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Things Fundam ( al, se neh> 


in the 





Life and Ministry 
of Jesus 


? 
Su 


By 
CHARLES L. BROOKS 





COKESBURY PRESS 


NAsHVILLE, TENN. 


CopyRIGHT, 1924 
BY 
LaMar & BARTON 


To My Sainted Mother, Mary S. Brooks: 


Who went down into the valley of suffering to 
bring me into being, tenderly nursed me, trained 
my infant feet to walk, and bound me to the 
feet of God by prayer; 


To My Wife, Martha Blanche Brooks: 


Who joined her life with mine when I was bro- 
ken in fortune and obscure in position, yet nev- 
er flinched in all those frightful days of ‘‘pio- 
neering,’’ nor lost faith in me; who in utter 
self-sacrificing devotion gave birth to my six 
children and trained them in the fear of God; 


To My Daughter, Ada Brooks: 


Who was born on the day the Sixty-Ninth Ses- 
sion of the East Oklahoma Conference convened 
at Ada, Oklahoma, and dedicated to God in 
Holy Baptism by the sainted Bishop Hoss— 


THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 


a a ae 


ety <i 
rere 
, 7 

- Saaeh 7 
cant ee | | 


ol Bi 


TES 
ss 





PREFACE 


PRESENT-DAY opinion is in a perfect ferment over 
the interpretation of Scripture. The two leading 
schools have been styled ‘‘the traditionalists” and 
“the intellectuals.”” A better characterization would 
be ‘“‘the conservatives’? and “the radicals.” The 
conservatives have in large measure assumed that 
they have all the religion; the radicals, that they 
have all the brains. The tragedy of it all is that the 
multitude is utterly confused and knows not which 
“school” to follow. 

No detailed study of the writings of the rad- 
icals, or modern critics, can fail to convince one 
that the views of the radicals and of the New Tes- 
tament writers, with reference to the person and 
nature of Jesus, are irreconcilable. One simply can- 
not believe the critics and at the same time the 
New Testament writers. Their views are mutually 
exclusive. To argue anything else is to fly in the 
face of the facts. Since Christ alone is responsible 
for the views of the New Testament writers, par- 
ticularly those of the Evangelists, the issue be- 
comes a direct one between Christ and the critics, 
and the sole demand upon the individual is to de- 
cide between the two. 

Now, does the wew of Christ, as presented to us in 
the Gospels, make a greater demand on human cre- 
dulity than the view of him as presented by the modern 
critics? 


(5) 


6 Things Fundamental 


In the Gospels and Creeds he is represented as 
a person with two separate and distinct natures, 
human and divine, which can neither be divided nor - 
confused. Under the guise of the human we see:him 
as ‘‘the Son of Man,” of lowly parents, poor and de- 
spised, rejected of men, forsaken by his disciples, 
and crucified on a Roman cross. Under the guise of 
the divine we see him as “‘the Son of God,” ‘‘consub- 
stantial with the Father,” “‘begotten, not made,” and 
“very God of very God.” These two natures are 
united in one person, so that he was ‘‘God manifest 
in the flesh.”” This involves the supernatural, and to 
attempt to account for Jesus on any other ground 
is neither historical nor scientific. The real Christian 
can accept and defend no other view. 

By the radicals Jesus is presented to us as @ 
visionary, no different in his generation from or- 
dinary human beings. His remarkable conscious- 
ness is psychologically explained as absolutely and 
exclusively human. His supernatural power is 
denied. His miracles of healing are accounted for by 
moral therapeutics. He drew about him a band of 
followers who were more interested in the perpetua- 
tion of a doctrine than in telling the truth. Indeed, 
wholesale indictment of ancient writers is some- 
times made in order to find ground for discrediting 
the Evangelists. John is depicted as a vehement 
partisan who subordinated facts to doctrine, with 
“the fine instinct of the literary artist.” Luke 
is charged with the deliberate zdealization of the 
characters of Jesus and the Apostles. According to 
some of the critics, Mark’s Gospel is a sort of “crazy 
quilt,” composed of any kind of convenient “pieces” 


Preface 7 


that would enable the author to work out his “de- 
sign.”’ Matthew was not the author of the Gospel 
accredited to him, the real author being some 
Palestinian Jew, who probably used a collection of 
proof-texts of which Matthew was the redactor or 
editor. 

One is impressed with the great number of “sup- 
positions” and “assumptions” employed by the 
critics. They ‘“‘assume” that “peddlers of tradi- 
tion,” or “‘catechizers,”’ furnished the oral accounts 
of the life and ministry of Jesus, from which the 
written accounts of the Evangelists were made up. 
They are as full of “documents” as an egg is of 
meat. The frequent use they make of “legends,” 
“oral traditions,” “logia,’”’ ‘“‘Petrine Memoirs,” 
“Journal of Travel’’—all purely imaginary—re- 
minds one of the “J,” “E,’’ “D” explanations of 
the Pentateuch, or of the “document-theory” of 
Astruc, the “fragment-theory’”’ of Geddes, the 
“‘supplement-theory”’ of De Wette, or the “crys- 
tallization-theory”’ of Ewald. 

These speculative, conjectural, unproved as- 
sumptions, inimical to supernatural religion and 
subordinated to the end of neutralizing it, are pro- 
fessedly based on purely literary grounds, on diction, 
style, and correspondence with historical surround- 
ings. The long succession of scholars in this school, 
beginning with Spinoza, a Dutch Jew and rational- 
ist, have been notorious in their opposition to the 
miraculous and supernatural. 

No normal mind can come from a close study of 
their speculations without the following three dis- 
tinct impressions at least: 


8 Things Fundamental 


1. That the critics are hostile in their attitude 
toward the Evangelists and irreverent toward Jesus. 
To this I have not found one single exception. | 

2. That the critics have a preconceived ‘“‘the- 
ory’’ which they will maintain at any cost. This 
theory they translate into an zpse dixit which is 
not historical science at all, but infidelity naked 
and unashamed. Their attacks upon the integrity of 
the Evangelists are but the tactics of the cuttle- 
fish, which inks the waters to hide himself. 

3. That the views of the critics make a very 
much greater demand on human credulity than the 
most marvelous miracles of Jesus. 

No reconciliation between the teachings of these two 
schools is possible. The battle must be waged to the 
bitter end. | 

The value of prophecy over private interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures is shown at 2 Peter i. 19, 
20. The statement follows immediately upon his 
relation of his personal connection with the events 
of the Transfiguration. The effect of that experience 
had been to confirm to him and his fellow disciples 
the truth of prophecy; that prophecy, unlike the 
heathen myths of the appearances of the gods 
among men, or the Gnostic figments about emana- 
tions from the deity, was no system of “cunningly 
devised fables.” To this fact two of their senses had 
borne witness, the sight and the hearing. They were 
“eyewitnesses of his majesty’ and heard the “voice 
which came from heaven.” 

The word used for “eyewitnesses” is not the 
ordinary word, but epopies, “‘spectators,” employed 
by the Greeks to designate those who had attained 


Preface 9 


unto the third, or highest, degree of the Eleusin- 
ian mysteries. It means here that Peter and his com- 
panions felt that they had been admitted by initi- 
ation at the Transfiguration into the highest mys- 
teries of our holy religion. And as if to give force 
additional to the weight of testimony, he emphat- 
ically asserts that “we heard” this voice from 
heaven, using the personal pronoun, a thing that is 
never done in Greek except for emphasis. 

Of the value of this testimony to Peter and his 
companions there can be no doubt. It was a con- 
firmation to them of all they had ever read or been 
taught in the prophecies concerning the Messiah. 
But in value beyond this personal experience and 
private interpretation is the ‘word of prophecy” 
itself. ‘T'o this fact the sacred writer gives expres- 
sion: “We have the word of prophecy yet more 
sure.” That is to say, The word of prophecy is a 
surer foundation for faith than any narrative of what 
we have seen and heard. 

The testimony of all the astronomers to the 
existence of the polestar is a surer foundation of 
faith than any single personal observation of the 
star itself. By the sense of sight I am convinced 
that I see that star. But my sight may be defective 
and my conclusions erroneous. But the sight of all 
eyes is not defective, and when I read the testimony 
of the fathers, that they, back as far as human his- 
tory gives any trace, bear witness to the presence 
of that star there in the north where I seem to have 
seen it, that the ancient Egyptians built the tun- 
nels of their pyramids to face exactly to the north 
for the purpose of observing the transits of that 


10 Things Fundamental 


star, my faith is settled and my conclusions sure. 
So men may say to me, “Lo, here is Christ, and, 
lo, there.”” The voices of Madam Eddy and Pastor _ 
Russell may call to me. The scientists may say, 
“We have found him.” The people who sit ‘‘in the 
region and shadow of death” may testify that among 
them a “light is sprung up.” I may hear Nathanael 
say, ‘Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the 
King of Israel.’”’ I may even behold his words and 
conclude with Nicodemus, ‘‘No man can do these 
miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” 
But never, until the finger of “Moses in the law” 
points unerringly to him and the voice of all the 
prophets proclaim him as the person of whom they 
“did write,’”’ can I be sure that he is the Christ. 

To this value of prophecy Christ himself bore 
witness. In his parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus 
he repeats the conversation between the Rich Man 
and Abraham. In response to the Rich Man’s 
prayer that Lazarus be sent to his father’s house to 
warn his five brothers, Abraham significantly re- 
plies: “‘They have Moses and the prophets. 

If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither 
will they be persuaded, though one rose from the 
dead”’ (Luke xvi. 27-31). 

To this “word of prophecy”? Peter exhorts the 
Christian world to take heed, as unto a lamp, not 
merely a fitful beam of light that ‘“‘shines in where 
all else is gloomy,” but a steady stream of light 
that can be made to shine upon first one spot and 
then upon another, places squalid and dirty and 
hence ‘‘dark,” until a right faith in Jesus Christ 
at last brings complete illumination. , 


Preface 11 


This process of illumination is gradual. It be- 
gins as the daydawn, first heralded by the day- 
star—Phosphoros, “the light-bringer’—the light 
more and more gaining ascendancy over the dark- 
ness, aS a reward of constant faith and study of 
God’s revelation, until the brightness of entire day- 
light at last is come. The Perfect Day will not come 
until life’s fitful dream is ended and we awake in 
his likeness in the Land of Light and Love. 

This process of illumination, he gives us to under- 
stand, does not “arise”? from our own unaided in- 
terpretation of the Scriptures. Scripture is not 
even its own interpreter. God is his own interpret- 
er, and he makes the Scriptures plain. “Prophecy 
was brought not at any time by the will of man: but 
men spoke from God, being moved by the Holy 
Ghost.” Their utterances were no mere personal 
expositions of Scripture. They made no personal 
effort in those utterances to solve the difficulties 
which beset the human race. They simply and only 
uttered the things they were inspired to tell, things 
beyond and deeper than themselves. This is the 
first thing which Peter says we must wnderstand. 
And the same Spirit which inspired these “men of 
old” will for us continue to illumine words which 
aforetime seemed dark, if we learn to depend upon 
him who was the source and beginning of all their 
utterances. This alone can give permanence to 
prophecy and steadfastness to faith. 

I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to 
Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon (one of the bishops of the 
M. E. Church, South, Nashville, Tenn.), Dr. R. 
S. Hyer (professor in Southern Methodist Univer- 


12 Things Fundamental 


sity, Dallas, Tex.), Dr. L. S. Barton (pastor of 
University Church, Norman, Okla.), Dr. W. L, 
Blackburn (pastor of Centenary Church, Tulsa. 
Okla.), Dr. A. L. Seales (pastor of Oak Cliff Church, 
Dallas, Tex.), Dr. J. M. Peterson (presiding elder 
of the Vinita District, Vinita, Okla.), Rev. Lovick 
P. Law (one of the general evangelists of the M. E. 
Church, South, Siloam Springs, Ark.), and Hon. 
W. J. Horton (of McAlester, Okla.), for reading my 
manuscripts and offering helpful criticisms; also to 
The Methodist Quarterly Review for permission to use 
certain chapters which have appeared in its pages. 

I do not dare to hope that I have brought any- — 
thing “new” into these discussions. I have only 
tried to mark the path I myself have followed to 
find the ultimate basis of faith. With the hope 
that this work may be helpful to others I send it 
forth. Let all who read it breathe a prayer that I 
may be faithful unto death. 


THE AUTHOR. 
SAPULPA, OKLA., February 15, 1923. 


CONTENTS 





CHAPTER PAGE 
I. THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM.......0-00¢ 15 

II, THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST: HIS VIRGIN BIRTH 34 
Ril eee rth DAPTISM OF sI BSUS fitc ic ck Ublacaua vitae see 55 
ENV; JTHEY TEMPTATION OF JESUS... 0c 20ceccccccccs 69 
VW EHHPMARACLES OF JESUS 8 cies sc ccccis vee ve sat Oe 
VL THe: COMING KINGDOM. owe sic o ssc. 0 och Se ae US 
AE SIN ANI DIMATH Sieve wittic’s tec a'ce le vlee'ee See PAL, 
Vili He CONGUEST OF SIN: ..4.c.sic ss eulees cules aviee ee Lom 
IX. THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS.........0.000. pe Loo 
A LHE LIGHT OF THE. WORLD... 20s ces cules case 168 
XI. THE ETERNAL QUESTION. .....ccccccccccces See Ok 
BIBLIOGRAPHY.........4. Tale waves sisicisiow aicroers 207 








CHAPTER I 
THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM 


In the original partition of Palestine to the He- 
brews each family received an inheritance, which 
was to fall by entail to the descendants of that 
household forever. To mark the limits or bound- 
aries of one’s lands use was made of certain fixed 
objects, such as trees and stone pillars. These were 
called “landmarks.” To remove these objects was 
to destroy the only evidences of title and deprive 
one and his children of their inalienable rights. The 
one committing such a deed was guilty of great in- 
justice and confusion. Hence there came to be a 
law in Israel against the removal of the ancient 
landmarks. 

But there are “historical landmarks” as well— 
great events which have determined eras in the 
history of the human race, such as the Reformation, 
the French Revolution, and the Wesleyan Revival. 

There are still other great “‘landmarks’’—es- 
tablished usages which have prevailed from time 
immemorial, tested by the experience and wisdom 
of the ages; settled principles of government, such 
as the right of trial by jury; fixed educational 
policies, which look to the development of every 
faculty of the mind; confirmed social practices, 
such as the monogamous relation; definite religious 
convictions, such as a belief in the Primacy and 
Fatherhood of God. 

These ancient landmarks our fathers set to dis- 

(15) 


16 Things Fundamental. 


tinguish the limits of our inheritance. They are 
part and parcel of our national life, for they made 
our history what it is. To remove these landmarks 
is to be guilty of a crime against our civilization. 
It means to destroy the evidences of title to American 
manhood and citizenship and despoil our children ~ 
of their rights forever. 

To point out the fact that we are destroying our 
ancient landmarks and reviving pagan practices in 
the earth is the object of this chapter. | 

Those of the present day who think cannot but 
be conscious of an irrepressible conflict now going 
on between the ancient standards and rehabilitated 
paganism. They cannot fail to see that in every 
phase of life there is an intense revolt against the 
old ideas in government, education, morals, and 
religion. | 

On every hand we hear it constantly proclaimed 
that this is the age of enlightenment, liberty, prog- 
ress. It is so, but it is also the age in which indi- 
vidual whims, passions, and impulses are the sole 
measure of values; it is the age of laxity and con- 
fusion, of lawlessness, of moral anarchy; it is the age 
of gross materialism, selfishness, and lust; it is the 
age which regards man and not God as master. 
As a consequence, all society of the present day 
presents many striking analogies to the decadent 
paganism of the ancient Roman world under the 
reign of the Ceesars. 

In government, this protest is strongly empha- 
sized by the Socialist party, whose doctrines and 
practices are too well known to require special 
emphasis here. 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 17 


In education, this protest is reflected in the 
curricula of our public schools, where mere children 
are given the privilege of electing certain courses of 
study. Furthermore, throughout his school life 
the pupil is made to feel, “How much will this be 
worth to me?” instead of the ancient ideal, “How 
much may I profit the world by it?” 

In morals, the protest runs in a multitude of di- 
rections. Indeed, the moral sense seems to be 
largely wanting in the present generation. Modesty 
among girls is more and more becoming an un- 
known virtue, and this but paves the way for that 
later condition when, in womanhood, they cannot 
be made to feel a sense of shame because they so 
readily lend themselves to the multiplying evil of 
divorce. 

Those of you who have read Robert W. Chambers’ 
story, “The Common Law,’’ cannot so soon have 
forgotten the mingled feelings with which you 
closed its perusal. The story is nothing but a pro- 
test against the conventions of society with ref- 
erence to the question of marriage. It may be that 
Mr. Chambers did not so intend; really, I presume 
his aim was to make a defense of the old order 
against the new, since the common law was made to 
triumph in the end; but so powerful was his delinea- 
tion of the girl of the story, a sort of wild, reckless, 
yet sometimes strangely modest and firm character, 
who makes a terrific revolt against the common law, 
and so utterly weak his defense of the common law, 
that one can hardly escape the feeling that the 
accepted codes of society are but meddlesome inter- 
ferences with the indulgence of natural passions, 

2 


18 Things Fundamental. 


and that an alliance can be just as holy werhout the 
marriage bond as with it. 

The fundamental thrust here, as in all such 
literature, is at the home, the most vital spot in 
human life. And it is particularly full of peril to the 
young, especially that class of young who have 
never been made to feel the restraints of authority. 
These are easily taken in the meshes of the spider’s 
web and serve to swell the numbers in that ever- 
increasing class known as “sporting women,” who, 
though not prostitutes in the lowest sense, are the 
ready toys of any men their fancies light upon. 
Nor is it without effect upon those who have been 
made to feel the restraints of authority, with whom 
modesty is a virtue and the instincts of womanhood 
dominant. Young women are not able to discern 
the fine subtleties of this philosophy, to see the 
cloven hoof in it, and the effect of it upon them is 
iconoclastic. Their sympathies are aroused for 
those who seem to be suffering under conventional 
restraints. Sympathy leads to admiration; ad- 
miration, to discipleship Thus the standards of 
life are smashed; thus the courses of lives are shaped; 
and thus the welfare of the majority is sacrificed to 
the wild impulses of the few. 

In religion, the protest against the ancient order 
was instituted by the historical or higher critics, 
whose aim was to do away with the supernatural in 
religion. Their theory is that Revelation grew out 
of the life of Israel instead of being a prophecy of 
what that life would be. To use the language of one 
of its sponsors, himself a doctor of divinity, 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 19 


The view of Revelation that is forced upon us by con- 
sideration of the documentary theory does not allow us to 
believe that any doctrine can be revealed at any time or 
place; there is an order, a progress, a movement from the 
natural to the spiritual until ‘‘the fullness of time” is re- 
vealed. 

As a result of this historical criticism we are told 
that the first chapter of Genesis is “one of the 
latest additions to the Bible; that the story of 
Eden is a myth; that the story of Babel is not even 
“historical tradition,” but ‘a naive, poetic answer 
of the old time to certain questions; that the story 
of Cain and Abel “does not belong to the beginning 
of the world’s history; and that all ‘these primi- 
tive stories have been put together to give the ap- 
pearance of a connected history.”’ We learn also 
that the story of the trial of Abraham’s faith has 
become “a burden to Christian conscience; that 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had no actual existence, 
but were heroic traditional types, like Ulysses of the 
Odyssey; that there never was a Job, and the book 
which recites his experiences is a religious epic, 
depicting the struggles of a soul upward in its effort 
to find God; that Isaiah never uttered the prophecies 
attributed to him; that Daniel is a “pious fraud” 
written and palmed off on the Jews in postexilic 
times; that Jonah is an allegory, in which Jonah 
represents Israel and Babylon the fish that swallowed 
him; and that Christ was not supernaturally con- 
ceived. In short, they completely reject all the 
miracles of the Bible, because those miracles are, 
to use their language, “‘a burden to the faith of in- 
telligent men.” 

The effect of this, as might have been expected, 


20 Things Fundamental 


coming as it does in many instances from men high 
in the councils of the Church, has been to bring 
about “‘a wild confusion.” The majority of men, 
taught to look upon the word of God as a revelation 
of himself, cannot, without violence to their faith, 
endure the vandalism of the modern critic. As a 
consequence, many have been driven from their 
anchorage and tossed, “blown about by every wind 
of doctrine.’ They have concluded that if the 
Bible is false in so many particulars it is false in all. 
Hence, they rebel against its authority and the 
authority of the God of whom it purports to be a 
revelation. 

Now precisely what is the cause of this condition 
of things? ‘Why all this confusion in the temple?” 
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and the 
responsibility of this condition, of this confusion, 
must be laid at the door of the philosophy dominant 
at the present day. ; 

There are but two phases or aspects of human 
thought, and each one of these gains the ascendancy 
in ever-recurring cycles. First, there is the age of 
creation; secondly, the age of reflection, criticism, 
and reproduction. During the period of develop- 
ment, idealism is necessarily dominant; in the period 
of criticism, sensationalism. The one system be- 
lieves in the objective existence of truth and carries 
its head in the clouds in search of the fundamental 
verity—God; the other, that everything is conven- 
tional, nothing inherent and necessary, nothing 
pre-ordained. These two lines are clearly discernible 
throughout the history of philosophy. No philos- 
opher has ever written who did not lean to one or the 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 21 


other of these two systems. It would be impossible 
to speak philosophically except in terms of these. 

Now, those who belong to the so-called progres- 
sive school are wont to label the philosophy of this 
age as “new” and berate those who do not think 
with them as worshipers at the shrine of a dead past. 
They were never more thoroughly deceived. These 
ideas which they put forward with such a flourish 
of trumpets are as old as the “‘atoms”’ of Democritus, 
the “germs” of Anaxagoras, the “elements” of 
Empedocles, and the “principles” of the school of 
Miletus. According to these: 


There is no truth for man except in what he perceives, 
feels, and experiences. And as sensations differ for different 
individuals, a thing seeming green to one and blue to another, 
large to one and small to another, it follows that there are as 
many truths as individuals; that the individual is the measure 
of the true and the false; that there are no necessarily valid 
truths or principles, or, at least, that we have no certain 
criterion by which to recognize the absoute truth of a meta- 
physical or moral proposition. The individual is the measure 
of the true and the good. An act that benefits one man 
harms another; it is good for the former, bad for the latter. 
Practical truth, like theoretical truth, is a relative thing, a 
matter of taste, temperament, and education. . . . Let 
man, therefore, occupy himself with the only really accessible 
okject, with himself.! 


Boiled down to its essence, this is the “‘man the 
measure of all things” of the Sophists, and this is 
the regnant philosophy of our day. 

Opposed to this system was that of the Pythag- 
oreans, who had as overpowering an influence 
among the Doric people as the Sophists had among 


iWeber, ‘‘History ot Philosophy,” pages 60, 61. 


99 Things Fundamental 


the Ionians. They flourished at Crotona, Tarentum, 
and in the Sicilian republics, until driven out by 
“the victorious democracy.” The exiles took refuge — 
at Thebes and Athens, where their influence coun- 
teracted the gross materialism and skepticism of 
the Sophists and came to flower in the spiritualistic 
conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, in whom Greek 
philosophy reached its highest development both 
in depth and analysis. 

These philosophers believed in the objective 
reality of truth; that the great outside world re- 
flects the ideas of the Creator’s mind; and that the 
human mind is able to know that world, ‘‘because 
it is the expression of intelligence; they had an 
abiding faith in the moral order of the world, de- 
nounced the materialistic and hedonistic philoso- 
phies of their day, affirmed the hope of immortality 
and the inevitableness of the judgment of God. 

Now in order to determine the relative value of 
these two systems of philosophy we must trace their 
influence upon human life and destiny. 

The most brilliant era in the history of Greece and, 
so far as philosophy, language, poetry, and art are 
concerned, the most brilliant period of human 
history, grew out of that system of philosophy 
brought to completion by Plato and Aristotle. 
Turning to that part of history which lies between 
the years 500 and 300 B. C., the era dominated by the 
philosophic conceptions of these two men, we find 
the greatest number of great men ever produced in 
any similar period of time: in art, Plygnotus, Zeuxis, 
Parrhasius, Apelles, Phidias, and Praxiteles; in hiss 
tory, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; in 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 23 


statesmanship, Miltiades, Leonidas, Themistocles, 
Aristides, Cimon, Epaminondas, Phocion, and Per- 
icles; in philosophy, Pythagoras, Socrates, Hip- 
pocrates, Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle; in oratory, 
JEschines and Demosthenes. 

This philosophy produced these men and these 
men made Greece great. Speaking of this philos- 
ophy, Ridpath, in his ‘‘ History of the World,” says: 

In the time of universal darkness there was light in Hellas. 
From the streets of that city (Athens), from her walks, her 
groves, her Academy, a luminous effulgence was shed into 
all the world. In the highest seats of modern learning the 
reasoning of Plato and the formule of Aristotle still in some 
measure hold dominion over the acutest intellects of the 
world. Nor is it likely that the truth which they evolved 
from their capacious understanding will ever be restated in a 
form more acceptable and attractive to the human mind than 
that to which themselves gave utterance. They are to-day 
in all the world, “‘The dead but sceptered sovereigns who 
still rule our spirits from their urns.” 


Toward the close of this brilliant period the 
sensational philosophy of Epicurus began to gain 
the ascendancy, which was but a revival and ex- 
tension of the Sophists whom he studied. He be- 
came skeptical and believed that the fear of God was 
the principal obstacle to the happiness of man. 
He rejected the ideal and took interest only in the 
practical; made philosophy the servant and not the 
master of life.: He called men down out of the 
clouds and made them of the earth, earthy. Ac- 
cording to him, outside of matter there is nothing. 
This matter is composed of innumerable uncreated 
and indestructible atoms in perpetual motion, and 
in the formation of the visible universe these de- 


24 Things Fundamental 


viated from the perpendicular line by accident and 
were joined together into solid bodies. He there- 
fore assumed chance, the possibility of an effect 
without a cause. There being no existence or 
authority higher than that of man, pleasure be- 
came the highest good and virtue whatever 
impels man to seek it. 

Under the influence of this cheap shiloh the 
people of Greece lost their ideals, gave themselves 
up to a sensual enjoyment of the world, and allowed 
their institutions to fall into decay. In vain was the 
cry of patriotism lifted in the street. ‘The canvas- 
visions and stone-dreams of Hellas”? were ended; 
Greece was living Greece no more. The brush that 
painted the grapes so perfectly as to deceive the 
eye of birds had no hand to guide it. The souls of 
the people had dwarfed under the reign of sensualism, 
and their spirits were dead. | 

Introduced at Rome, this philosophy réceived the 
protection of the emperors, and easily became the 
mistress of her who had become mistress of all the 
world besides, and ultimately measured arms with 
the supernatural religion of Jesus. Under it Roman 
virtue and success found a common grave in vice and 
luxury. The old order passed away and men looked 
upon its passing without regret. “Like the Lotus- 
eaters of Tennyson, they were content to live on 
without honor, so they might exist in luxury and 
sluggish peace; they said in their lives, though 
possibly not in their words, 


‘Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, 
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined 
On the hills like gods together, careless ot mankind.’ ”” 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 25 


There was a decided disinclination to marriage, for 
“every woman was at heart a rake.’”’ Roman life 
looked out upon a prospect as dark as a page of 
midnight. Suicide became a fashion as a means of 
escape from it. The burden of Horace, Vergil, and 
Livy was, “Who shall restore us the past?” The 
fiercest invectives of Juvenal failed to arouse any- 
thing but resentment, and in a final note of despair 
Livy wrote in the preface to his History, 

One reward of this my toil will be that, for a time at all 
events, I shall be enabled to forget the desolation which has 
come upon our nation—our nation that has now reached a 
piteh of iniquity at which it can bear neither its vices nor yet 
the remedies for them. 


That is an awful picture of Roman life that the 
Apostle Paul draws in the first chapter of his Epistle 
to the Romans, but no more awful than the actual 
conditions justified; and his indictment of it was 
terrific. He charged them with having “changed the 
truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served 
the creature more than the Creator.”’ 

Now, it is the habit of cheap philosophers and 
shallow thinkers to charge the responsibility of the 
darkness of the Middle Ages against the Church. 
I deny it. That darkness was the product of in- 
fidelity—of the ancient destructive criticism of 
Democritus and Epicurus. We have just seen how 
that philosophy, introduced at Rome and protected 
by her powerful emperors, sapped the life of the 
State. So weakened, Rome could offer but feeble 
resistance to the heathen hordes that poured im- 
petuously over her borders from the north. She 
could not beat back her assailants, and upon the 


26 Things Fundamental 


dismembered territory of the ancient Empire the 
Visigoths and Vandals planted their colonies and 
took charge of her government. This properly — 
accounts for the darkness that followed the fall of 
Rome, “the chaos of barbarism” that fell upon 
the world “like the doom of the judgment day.” 

Into this midnight of the ages in which the Greco- 
Roman civilization fell to ruins Jesus Christ came 
and “brought life and immortality to light through 
the gospel.’”” Reénforced by this all-powerful ally, 
the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle again began to 
rise to the ascendancy, until it battered down the 
strongholds of heathenism and shaped the course of 
life of the Middle Ages. ‘Two great factors in this 
work were Paul at the beginning of the Christian 
era and Augustine about 300 years later, the last 
being the connecting link between Greek thought 
and the speculations of the schoolmen. Paul be- 
lieved in the existence of a God who can be known 
in experience, and in the midst of Mars’ Hill he 
delivered to those Athenians drunk with the sen- 
sualistic philosophy of Epicurus the mystery of the 
“unknown God” whom they “ignorantly wor- 
shiped.” Thus the dying breath of true Hellenism 
passed into Christianity. The ablest exponents of 
the gospel from then on and all the way through the 
Middle Ages were influenced in their teachings by 
the great philosophers of Greece. Weber says: 


In Catholicism as in Platonism, in the Church as in Plato’s 
State, the universal is superior to the particular; the whole 
precedes, rules, and absorbs the parts; the Idea is the true 
reality, the power superior to all individual existences. Yes 
The heroic age of Catholicism, the age of faith which pro 


’ 


The Recrudescence of Paganism pat 


duced the Crusades and built the Gothic cathedrals, could 
not but have an essentially idealistic, Platonic, and Augus- 
tinian philosophy. 


Wundt says: “The Middle Ages were wholly 
dominated by the Aristotelian psychology.”” Largely 
but not wholly, for toward the close of that period 
we find a revival of the ancient destructive criticism 
of Democritus and Epicurus by Roscellinus, a canon 
of Compiégne, who taught that there is no objective 
reality—nothing real, solid, and positive inde- 
pendently of the thought of the individual. This 
is nominalism, and nominalism is essentially skep- 
ticism. This does not imply skepticism in the low, 
vulgar sense, but metaphysical skepticism, that sort 
which holds that we cannot know anything about 
God, thus rendering the great doctrines of Revela- 
tion ‘uncertain and problematical’ and causing 
many to give up faith for science, or, worse still, 
to abandon it for freethinking. 

Now, what was the effect of this revival of the 
ancient destructive philosophy? There was a drift 
away from the ancient standards; men lost their 
grip upon God; and another period of darkness 
settled over the world. Human society was shaken 
to its foundations and was on the point of universal 
dissolution. 

Marking the transition from this period of dark- 
ness to the Modern Era was the Revival of Learn- 
ing. To that revival no single person contributed 
more than Thomas Aquinas. He was a profound 
student of Aristotle and introduced the Eastern 
Christian world to his philosophy. He believed 
that ‘“‘truth is the agreement of thought with its 


28 Things Fundamental 


object;” that first God thought, then things existed 
as he thought them; that the first task of philosophy 
is the demonstration of the existence of God, to 
reach which goal the revelation of God in Christ is 
necessary to direct the mind in its efforts; and that 
no philosophy is legitimate that does not begin 
with Revelation as a starting point. He was the 
strongest champion medizval orthodoxy ever had, 
and as a consequence was called the “Angel of the 
Schools.” 

The age that followed this revival was an age of 
research and production in literature, creation in © 
art and invention, discoveries in science and naviga- 
tion. In this age Gutenberg brought to light the 
art of printing, the first output of which was a Latin 
copy of the Bible; Galileo swept the heavens with 
his telescope, which revealed the order of the stellar 
universe; and the compass was invented, an ad- 
mirable assistant to navigation. The fall, in 1453, of 
Constantinople, which had been the sole repository 
of the learning of the world during the Dark Ages, 
caused the scholars nested there to scatter from 
“the crumbling state’ into Italy, taking their 
ancient classical authors with them, which led to the 
Renaissance first in Italy, afterwards in the West. 
Love for these classics became a passion, and a 
powerful impulse was given to the study of Greek and 
Latin. Universities sprang up, encouraged by the 
multitudes who flocked to the lectures of the School- 
men, and became influential agencies in the Revival. 
Out of the atmosphere of this age Columbus sailed 
to the discovery of the New World, impelled by the 
motive to carry the gospel to “the people that sat 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 29 


in darkness.” This age had a marvelous effect 
upon the growth of political liberty. Its influence 
was felt throughout the civilized countries of Europe. 
It produced the Reformation of Luther and the 
English literature of the ages of Chaucer and Eliza- 
beth. It was indeed the age of awakening, ren- 
aissance, the new birth. 

Near the close of the seventeenth and on through 
the first half of the eighteenth century we find 
another revival of the old destructive criticism, led 
by Thomas Hobbes. He was sensational and ma- 
terialistic in philosophy, hedonistic in ethics. He 
was tutor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles 
II., and without doubt his influence had much to 
do with the corrupt practices that existed about the 
court of that monarch. He taught that outside the 
science of observation there is no real knowledge; 
that interest is the supreme judge in morals as in 
everything else; that there is no absolute good, no 
absolute evil, no absolute justice, no absolute 
morality—all these being chimeras, gratuitous in- 
ventions of theology; and finally that might makes 
right. 

The publication of these views brought down 
upon him the wrath of the Church and Parliament, 
but the evil had already been done. Under its 
influence open and professed disregard for religion 
came to be a distinguishing characteristic of men, 
who railed at Christianity and its teachers much 
after the same fashion of the Socialists of our day. 
The teaching of Hobbes more or less influenced 
Hume, a contemporary of Wesley, who brought to 
flower the seed Hobbes had sown. In the fifty 


30 Things Fundamental 


years preceding the Wesleyan Revival there was 
gross sensualism and contempt for principle among 
the higher circles, profligacy and crime among the 
lower. Drunkenness and foul talk were no dis- 
credit to Horace Walpole, prime minister through 
the three reigns from Queen Anne to George II., 
and “the standing representative of political cyni- 
cism,” of “unbelief in high sentiment and noble 
aspirations.”’ To him talk of patriotism and public 
virtue was nonsense; “‘bribery and borough-jobbing 
were his base of power.”’ Fidelity to the marriage 
vow was sneered at, and Lord Chesterfield, in his | 
letters to his son, instructed him in the art of se- 
duction. This philosophy crossed the Channel into 
France and was translated into the Reign of Terror. 
Fortunately for England, the influence of Wesley in 
religion and Pitt in politics saved her from the fate 
of France. 

The destructive critical philosophy is essentially 
the same at every stage of its existence. There is 
nothing new init. Spencer’s contribution to it about 
the middle of the nineteenth century, though it 
assisted in its revival, added nothing. Spencer, 
like Anaxagoras, his ancient forerunner, used con- 
sciousness as a sort of deus ex machina to account for 
the movement of atoms, then abandoned it as soon 
as it had served its purpose. From the days of 
Democritus down to Spencer materialism had not 
changed, had added nothing to its stock in trade. 
It had the same old mechanical explanation of the 
world. One of the objections it had constantly met 
from the opposite school, and never answered, was 
the old question of “design.”’ In the last half of the 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 31 


nineteenth century Darwin published to the world 
his theory of the Origin of Species, and immediately 
the materialists flocked to his standard, believing 
that he had furnished them an answer to the oft- 
repeated and always-unanswered question. 

But was Darwin’s theory “new’’? No, for An- 
aximander, Heraclitus, and Empedocles all had a 
theory of evolution by which they accounted for the 
origin of beings, and were therefore his precursors. 
Does it answer the question? Is the struggle for ex- 
istence the first cause? And if it is, is it mechanical 
or intellectual? Why, the very expression, the 
struggle for existence, which is nothing less than the 
will to live, presupposes “an anterior, superior, and 
immaterial cause,’ and the terms, selection and 
choice, introduce “‘an intelligent element into na- 
ture.” It was impossible for him to avoid the use 
of such terms; pure mechanism cannot be made to 
explain the world of nature. Notwithstanding the 
apparent inconsistency of it, the materialists adopted 
the “theory,” and materialism and Darwinism 
have come to be regarded as synonymous terms. 

It is not too much to say that the publication of 
the “theory”? produced a sensation. Through the 
Church there ran first a feeling of indignation, then 
consternation. Some combated it, others became 
timid and silent before it; many adopted it, fearing 
that unless they did so they might not appear 
“learned” and “‘scientific.”” Once they had adopted 
it, there remained the necessity of adjusting them- 
selves to the new harness—fitting upon them both 
“the livery of heaven” and Darwin at one and the 
same time. The Bible had to be overhauled to 


32 Things Fundamental 


meet the demands of the theory; Revelation, ad- 
justed to science. Thus “historical criticism’? came 
about. For the Bible story of creation they sub- 
stituted ‘‘the geological theory of gradual evolu- 
tions and: imperceptible changes;”’ instead of seeing 
in man the image of God, which put an impassable 
gulf between him and the lower orders of animal 
life, they began to study the anatomy of anthropoid 
apes for traces of a possible ancestry, holding it to be 
infinitely more noble to claim kinship with the ape 
than with the clod. With them evolution came to 
be a fetish. Not only through creation, but through 
history, politics, education, and revelation the 
evolutionary process was made te run without a 
break. Darwin was all but deified, and as Horace 
looked forward in pleasant anticipation to his meet- 
ing with “good Aineas, rich Tullus, and Anchus” 
in the realms of dust and shade, so some of these 
fanatics looked forward to the time when they should 
strike hands with the apostle of evolution in the 
everlasting kingdom of God! 

Thus has the ancient destructive critical philos- 
ophy once again laid its withering hand upon 
human life and destiny. The effects of it, as I have 
already pointed out, are manifest. Even the great 
Bishop Hoss, than whom the Southern Methodist 
Church had no greater optimist, found cause for 
anxiety in the growing disregard for the authority 
of the Church. There is an ever-increasing dis- 
inclination to marriage and child-bearing, the 
divorce rate is staggering, and our native birth rate 
is already below our death rate, all of which leads 
Mrs. Townsend to say, in the January (1913) — 


The Recrudescence of Paganism 33 


number of The Methodist Quarterly Review, “To-day 
the American nation presents the anomalous con- 
dition of a people, young in years, giving evidence of 
senile decay.” 

Yet in spite of this a vast multitude go on in the 
so-called emancipation of woman at the utter peril 
of our civilization; go on reflecting in their lives that 
recrudescer.t paganism which finds expression in the 
lascivious dance, the appalling increase in immodesty 
of dress, divorce, and suicide, the decrease of the 
birthrate, the unrest of the mob, and the general 
reign of lawlessness. To meet the unblushing ef- 
frontery of that philosophy which sensualizes life 
and degrades mankind to the level of the brute, 
to check the sophistical individualism of the present 
day and restore the ancient landmarks, the truth 
of God, as embodied in the Gospels of Jesus Christ, 
must be thundered from the throne. Unless that 
avails, our civilization will sink into chaos and 
certain hell. 

3 


CHAPTER II 


THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST: HIS 
VIRGIN BIRTH 


WITHOUT hesitation I announce at once my be- 
lief in the orthodox view of the supernatural con- 
ception and Virgin Birth of Christ. After the man- 
ner of Paul, I raise the question, “Why should it 
be thought a thing incredible” that a woman should 
conceive by the Holy Ghost? No scientist will say 
that man has always been on the earth. Of necessi- 
ty, therefore, he had a beginning. If we carry our 
imagination backward, we reach at last that “‘begin- 
ning.”” When we look upon the first man we can no 
longer say, “This man is a son of a human being 
like himself.”” Whose son, then, is he? Certainly 
not man’s. Unless, in the spirit of unbelief, we 
assert that he has no intelligible antecedent, we 
must confess that “‘he is the son of God.” 

And this is precisely what Luke, in his gene- 
alogy of Jesus, does in the case of Adam. He, as 
the beginning of his kind, having neither father 
nor mother, was the direct creation of God, and 
was therefore “the son of God.” If, without any hu- 
man agency whatever, God could begin a race, why 
should it be thought a thing incredible that the 
same God, through the creative energy of the Holy 
Ghost, should form in the womb of the Virgin Mary 
the head of a new humanity, to be known as the 
Son of God and the Son of Man, thus forever link- 
ing God and humanity into one? Certainly, like 

(34) 


The Incarnation of Christ 35 


Luke in the case of Adam, we stand face to face 
with him. How shall we account for him? I believe 
that “he was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of 
the Virgin Mary.” 

This I conceive to be a necessary article of faith. 
Unlike many theological writers and thinkers of 
our day, I am unwilling to believe that “there 
is no dogmatic necessity for maintaining this doc- 
trine.” It is a notable fact that the fundamental 
question of Jesus to his disciples and hearers was 
not ethical but personal. ‘“‘Whom say ye that I 
am?” was the question he put to his disciples. 
“What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?” he 
asked of the critical Pharisees. If belief in his 
person was fundamental then, it is fundamental now. 
If it was of primary importance to know whose son 
he was in that day, it is of primary importance to 
know whose son he is in this day. Christ is the 
same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and his religion 
is no weathervane to shift with the changing breeze. 
The one who believes in Christ’s person never has 
any difficulty in believing in Christ’s doctrine. 
In no other way could he have been “‘the Son of God”’ 
and “the Son of Man”’ than by a special creative act 
of God upon the Virgin Mary. To throw this doc- 
trine away means to give up the deity of Jesus and 
surrender ourselves into the hands of a hopeless 
infidelity. 

From the beginning of Christological construc- 
tion the Church has for the most part predicated of 
Christ a complete human nature. The Council of 
Chalcedon in 451 declared him possessed of “a 
rational soul and body, consubstantial with us ac- 


36 Things Fundamental 


cording to his manhood, in all things like unto us, 
without sin.’”’ But to say that Christ is human and 
stop with that is to stop far short of the truth con- 
cerning him. It means to say that he not only had a 
human mother, but a human father as well—a repu- 
diation of his supernatural conception, which is 
tantamount to a denial of his deity. The Church, 
therefore, voicing the orthodox view of Jesus, went 
further than a declaration of his humanity and said 
that he was the Word of the Father, or the mode of 
God’s manifestation of himself; that he was of one 
substance with the Father, as well as consubstantial 
with man; and that as a consequence two whole na- 
tures were linked together in one person, so that 
he is both God and man. 

Here is the first point of conflict. Destructive 
Criticism, mustering to its side all the ingenuity 
and skill that critical scholarship knows anything 
about, has sought to overthrow the teachings of 
Orthodoxy with reference to the Supernatural 
conception and Virgin Birth of Christ. It is not 
that the destructive critics accept any of the su- 
pernatural. The fact is, they donot. The formative 
forces in the _ historical-critical school were ra- 
tionalists. Spinoza, the real originator of destruc- 
tive criticism, wasa Dutch rationalist and Jew. Eich- 
horn, called the father of Higher Criticism, was a 
German rationalist. De Wette, though frequently 
quoted by Christian commentators, was nothing but 
infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian ra- 
tionalists. Kuenen was an agnostic. Wellhausen 
taught that “the religion of Israel was a naturalistic 
evolution from heathendom.” F. C. Baur, who 


The Incarnation of Christ 37 


founded the Tiibingen School and introduced the 
historical method into New Testament criticism, 
was Hegelian. 

These are the stars of first magnitude. All the 
rest are satellites who revolve about and reflect 
the light of their central suns. Dr. Samuel Davidson 
is but the English reflection of Baur; Dr. S. R. 
Driver, of Kuenen and Wellhausen; Dr. C. A. 
Briggs, the American satellite of Ewald. It may, 
therefore, be safely asserted that the pioneers in 
the field of Higher Criticism had a bias against 
the supernatural and that all their ‘theories’ are 
built upon that bias. Changing the figure, the 
rationalists are the masters; all the rest are but 
parrots repeating the sayings of their masters. 

They seem to make their strongest stand against 
the supernatural conception and Virgin Birth of 
Christ as being, in their judgment, the weakest 
link in the orthodox chain. If they could succeed 
in overthrowing this doctrine, then the doctrines 
of Christ’s incarnation, his sinless life, his mira- 
eles, his resurrection, and his exaltation to glory 
would the more easily follow to a fall, and the 
triumph of the older rationalism as well as of the 
newer historical-critical school would be complete. 
By a strange process of reasoning George Adam 
Smith finds warrant for this procedure in the conduct 
of Christ himself, whom he styles the first critic of 
Old Testament scriptures. Conceding the truth of 
this, criticism of the Bible by Jesus, the super- 
natural Son of God, is one thing; by Wellhausen, a 
German rationalist, quite another. This would bea 
joke, if it were not sacrilege. 


38 Things Fundamental 


The critics predicate their denial of the super- 
natural conception and Virgin Birth on three prin- 
cipal grounds: 

1. Nearly all the old Oriental religions, ante- 
dating Christianity by many centuries, carry stories 
of this kind concerning their gods, prophets, and 
great leaders. This is only a pagan attempt to 
account for a marvelous man. 

2. All the other New Testament writers are si- 
lent with reference to it. Mark, the oldest Gospel, 
and John, the latest, make no mention of it. It was 
not an original Christian doctrine at all and was 
wholly unknown to the early Church. 

3. The story originated about one hundred years 
after the beginning of the Christian era, and was 
incorporated into Matthew and Luke by later hands. 
To this Matthew and Luke give internal evidence. 

Now, it must be patent to every one who is 
versed at all that those who hold to these views 
have no adequate idea of the history of man, to 
say nothing of the Revelation of God. That there 
were distorted stories running in the legends of 
the pagan nations relative to an incarnation and 
the ultimate restoration of the human race, no in- 
formed man would attempt to deny. But to say that 
Christianity borrowed from these is not true. If 
we confine Christianity to time this side the birth 
of Christ, there would be weight in this contention. 
But Christianity in essence cannot be so confined. 
It is inseparably linked with ancient Judaism. It 
goes back in history to where “the memory of man 
runneth not to the contrary.” It leaps the lapses 
of time. It runs back along the weary stretch of 


The Incarnation of Christ 39 


the centuries to the home of our first parents, to 
the promise God made to the woman. It even goes 
back beyond all time to the council-chambers of God 
in Eternity, when Christ was slain “from before the 
foundations of the world.’”’ That story all men, as 
they scattered from the comman cradle, like birds 
from a common nest, carried away with them and 
kept alive in some form through all the changing and 
changeful conditions of human life. 

Not only does this conception of a divine de- 
liverer run in the Oriental, Grecian, Roman, and 
even some of the most barbarous nations of the 
world, but also the stories of the creation of the 
world, its destruction by water, its repeopling, and 
its final destruction by fire. Of this last event 
Seneca writes: 


The time will come when the whole world will be consumed, 
that it may be again renewed, when the powers of nature will 
be turned against herself, when stars will rush on stars, and 
the whole material world which now appears so resplendent 
with beauty and harmony will be destroyed in one general 
conflagration. In this grand catastrophe of nature all ani- 
mated beings (excepting the universal intelligence), men, 
heroes, demons, and gods shall perish together. 


This sounds very much like Malachi. Did Sene- 
ca borrow from Malachi, or Malachi from Seneca? 
Malachi lived and wrote 400 B.C.; Seneca, from 4 
B.C. to 65 A.D. The inevitable conclusion is that 
the Stoic philosopher wrote from current tradition, 
a tradition brought down from the primal history of 
man, or obtained from the prophecies of the Jews. 

And this is always the case. No philosopher, 
lawgiver, poet, prophet, sage, or seer, whether Jew 
or Gentile, ever pretended that he discovered the 


40 Things Fundamental 


existence of God or any of the laws that bind crea- 
ture to Creator. Plato says in his “‘Republic”’ that 
“no mortal can make laws to purpose.’”’ Demos- 
thenes called law “the invention and gift of God.” 
So far were the ancients from presuming that they 
themselves originated any or all of these things, 
that they invariably ascribed them to divinity— 
the gift of God to man—or to tradition—the gift of 
the fathers to their sons. It is therefore passing 
strange that historical critics have the courage 
to claim for the ancients what the ancients never 
once claimed for themselves. | 

So far is it from being true that Christianity 
borrowed the supernatural conception and Virgin 
Birth from the pagan world, the pagan world took 
whatever it had of this and all kindred truths from 
Christianity, or the original revelation of God to 
man. Agreeably with this Schaff says of heathenism: 
“Many of its religious traditions and usages were 
faint echoes of the primal religion.’”” 

As to the second ground of objection, the al- 
leged silence of all the other New Testament writers, 
let us suppose for the moment that it is true. Would 
that constitute a difficulty for the sincere seeker 
after truth? I cannot think so. Mark and John do 
not deal with the birth and infancy of Jesus. Had 
they dealt with that phase and period of his life 
it might have been expected that they would relate 
how he came into the world. Indeed, it would have 
been a strong ground for skepticism if they had not 
done so. But Mark’s object was to present Jesus to 
the world as the Servant of Jehovah, so he began 


2“History of the Christian Church,”’ Vol. I., page 74. 


The Incarnation of Christ Al 


his Gospel with the baptism and entrance of Jesus 
upon his public ministry. It would have been a 
strange thing, then, if he had gone back beyond 
his beginning, or stepped aside from the general 
trend of his narrative, to inject into his record 
something of the birth and infancy of Jesus. John, 
on the other hand, dealt with the deity of Jesus. 
In such a treatise he had no earthly use for a human 
genealogy. 

As for the other New Testament writers, what 
reason could they have had for dealing with such 
matters? Their very silence is the strongest kind 
of evidence of the assumed fact. For who can be- 
lieve that St. Paul, with his characteristic bold- 
ness, candor, and love for truth, would have allowed 
the matter to go unchallenged had there been no 
foundation for it in fact? 

Not only might they have had no reason for 
bringing it into their writings, but the greatest 
reason for not doing so. If the atmosphere in which 
Jesus was born and grew up “was charged with 
hostility and suspicion,’’ the atmosphere in which 
the apostles lived was no less so. This was a delicate 
matter, and to flaunt it constantly in the face of 
the Jews of that day would have meant to heap 
further odium upon the name of Christ and increase 
the burdens of the early Church. The bitterness, 
venom, and slander that afterwards came from the 
pen of Celsus and others of like attitude, in their 
charges of adultery against the Virgin Mother and 
bastardy against her Son, show how fraught with 
folly would have been a reiteration of this matter in 
the early days of Christianity. 


42 Things Fundamental 


But the allegation of silence will not stand the 
test of rigid investigation. From Mark’s Gospel 
I instance three passages which show his idea of 
the deity of Jesus: (a) One day in the synagogue 
at Capernaum there was a man present possessed of 
an unclean spirit, and the unclean spirit acknowl- 
edged Jesus on this wise, ‘‘I know thee who thou art, 
the Holy One of God”’ (Mark i. 24). (b) On another 
day, in the land of the Gadarenes, Jesus came in 
contact with another man possessed of an unclean 
spirit, and the unclean spirit cried out, “What 
have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God?” | 
(Mark v. 7.) (c) On still another day, while Jesus 
was teaching in the Temple at Jerusalem, he said, 
‘How say the scribes that Jesus is the son of David? 
For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The Lord 
said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I 
make thine enemies thy footstool. David therefore 
himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his 
son?” (Mark xii. 35-37.) 

While there is nothing in these passages in ex- 
press terms regarding the conception and birth of 
Jesus, yet no possible construction put upon this 
language could lead us to any other conclusion than 
that Mark fully believed the record of Matthew. 
“How say the scribes that Jesus is the son of David?” 
When we get at the root of this question, we get 
the exact truth as it is and as Mark and all the 
’ other New Testament writers fully understood it. 
As Christ he was God’s anointed, ‘‘a priest forever 
after the order of Melchizedek, having neither be- 
ginning of days nor end of life.’”” As such he could 
not have been the seed of David. But this is not 


The Incarnation of Christ 43 


to be understood with Reuss, Renan, ef id genus 
omneé, as a repudiation of all claims to be the son and 
successor of David. He was the Word, the self- 
revelation of the eternal Godhead from eternity, but 
also the Son of Man, in whom and by whom the 
mind and purpose of God toward the world find 
expression—the relationship of God to God and the 
self-relationship of God to man. As such he was the 
Christ of God, generated in the womb of the Virgin 
Mary by the creative energy of the Holy Ghost. 
Now, if we dip into John’s Gospel ever so slightly 
we find evidence no less cogent. In the very first 
utterance we meet with his doctrine of the Word. 
This doctrine John is charged with having borrowed 
from the Alexandrine speculation. Even so good 
a man as David Smith is led into this blunder. 
Cremer denies. He says: “If we are to seek for an 
explanation of the Logos of St. John beyond Holy 
Scripture itself, it is to be found much more ap- 
propriately in Jewish theology than in Philo’s doc- 
trine of the Logos.” He goes on to say further that 
Philo’s use was an unreasonable attempt to unite 
Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, whereas 
John’s use is purely Jewish and “belongs to the 
economy of grace” (Lexicon, page 390). This pre- 
existent Word “‘became flesh.”’ All denial of this is 
with John the rankest sort of heresy (See 1 John 
iv. 8). In i, 18 we find the expression, “the only 
begotten Son’’; in i. 34, “‘the Son of God’’; in i. 49, 
“Thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of 
Israel.”” What do these expressions mean if they 
are not ascriptions of deity to Jesus? And how could 
he be the Son of God if not generated of God? 


44 Things Fundamental 


True, the expression, “the son of God,” is a term 
applied by John not only to Christ but to all Chris- 
tians, asin his first Epistle (iii. 2), “Beloved, noware we 
thesons of God,’’ ete. Buthowarewethesons of God? 
John alone (ili. 6) gives us the interview with Nico- 
demus, during which the doctrine of regeneration 
was laid down. The plain inference from that teach- 
ing is that all men born of bloods (male and female) 
are in need of the communication of a new life. Jesus 
was born of the flesh; he was man. Was he therefore 
in need of this regeneration? Was he ever outside 
the kingdom of God? It is unthinkable. How then | 
did he obtain his exemption from regeneration? 
There is no answer for it except in the mode of his 
generation. He was “begotten,’”’ not made. We 
are sons by re-generation; Jesus, by generation. 
He is the only begotten Son. Now, “‘beget’’ means 
*“‘to procreate as a father, to generate, to cause to 
exist.”” Since, in the terminology of John, the 
preéxistent Word “became flesh,’ and was “the 
only begotten Son of God,” how idle it is for any 
man to say that he is not fully agreed with the 
Synoptists on the conception and birth of Jesus. 

So Paul (at Romans i. 3, 4), “Concerning his Son, 
which was made [born] of the seed of David accord- 
ing to the flesh; and declared [demonstrated, not 
made] to be the Son of God with power, according 
to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from 
the dead; even Jesus Christ our Lord,’’ commits 
himself to the same great truth. If this be not con- 
vincing, hear him again at Galatians iv. 4: ‘When 
the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son,’ 
born of a woman,” ete. Why not of a man? At 


The Incarnation of Christ. 45 


any rate, Paul cannot be used as a witness against 
the Virgin Birth. 

It is nothing but monumental nonsense to say 
that this matter was wholly unknown to the early 
Church. It is certain that Cerinthus, a Gnostic 
contemporary and adversary of St. John at Ephesus, 
denied the Virgin Birth. If the story was of so 
late a date as the critics say, and was not known, 
believed, and taught by the Church in the first cen- 
tury, how could he have denied it? 

Is it to be supposed that Joseph was so care- 
less of Mary’s honor as to leave no account of the 
supernatural conception of Jesus? And what will one 
do with the passage at John viii. 41? Is it a strain 
upon it to say that the Jews, smarting under the 
implication of Jesus that the devil was their fa- 
ther, hurled this at him as a reproach in turn? If 
this is a legitimate inference, where did they get it? 
Certainly not from the Gospels, for they were 
not yet written, but from the already current tra- 
dition. Was this part of the pain of the sword that 
pierced Mary’s soul (Luke ii. 35)? 

The third item at issue is the injection of the 
story into Matthew and Luke by later hands. This 
attacks the integrity of the Gospels as well as the 
reputed date of Matthew’s composition; for the ob- 
jectors put Mark before Matthew in date of composi- 
tion, because Mark seems to lend color to their “‘in- 
jection theory.”’ 

That Matthew wrote the Gospel accredited to 
him is the testimony of all antiquity, and all the 
Greek manuscripts put it first in order, just as 
it appears in our common version. The date of its 


AG Things Fundamental 


composition cannot be accurately determined, be- 
cause we have only internal evidence to guide us. 
That it was written before the destruction of Je- 
rusalem is beyond all doubt. The charge that it 
was translated by later hands from a Hebrew orig- 
inal, at which time the so-called “injection”? was 
made, cannot be sustained. The idea of ‘‘a Hebrew 
original”’ arose in a curious way. Epiphanius, speak- 
ing of the source from which the Evangelists drew 
their authority, used the expression, “from the 
same fountain.” This seems to have given Eichhorn 
the notion of a common original document from 
which the Evangelists copied, and led him to attempt 

a reconstruction of that “‘document.” Having en- — 
tered upon that path, he soon discovered difficulties 
which required a further manufacture of documents. 
But he was equal to the emergency. Who ever 
heard of a destructive critic that was not equal to 
anything he undertook? In all he manufactured 
five. This was the beginning of docwments, but un- 
fortunately not the end. Bishop Marsh, an English 
theologian, following the lead of the German, and, 
not to be outdone by him, manufactured ezght, be- 
ginning with ‘‘a Hebrew original,’”’ no doubt basing 
his action on the statement of Papias that Matthew 
wrote the oracles (logia) in the Hebrew dialect. It 
is passing strange that none of these documents 
about which the critics have so much to say have 
ever descended to posterity. If there was ever “a 
Hebrew original,” it has been hopelessly lost. Our 
Matthew is not a translation from any source, but . 
is an original Greek production, written in the 
vernacular koine, or world-speech of the day. Upon 


The Incarnation of Christ 47 


this the ablest critical scholarship is agreed, even 
in the light of the recent new discoveries. 

Now, did the Gospels, as originally written by 
Matthew and Luke, carry the story of the super- 
natural conception and Virgin Birth? The critics 
say not. Wellhausen, in his translations of these 
two Gospels, began each Gospel with the third chap- 
ter of our common version, without one word of ex- 
planation as to why he did it. Why did he do it? 
Simply because he had a “theory” to sustain. He 
did not believe the stories carried by these chapters, 
so in a summary and unscientific fashion omitted 
them from his translations, a thing not done by a 
single unmutilated manuscript of the Gospels in all 
the world, whether uncial, cursive, version, or re- 
cension, except the recension known as “the Gos- 
pel of the Ebionites”’ and the non-canonical recen- 
sion of the Gnostic Marcion’s “ Gospel of Luke.”’ In 
all the rest the story of the conception and birth 
of Jesus, as recorded by Matthew and Luke, appears. 
Only Matthew and Luke deal with the birth and in- 
fancy of Jesus. Delete their accounts and there is 
no record of them in human history. A heathen, 
reading Welljhausen’s translations only, could not 
know anything about how Christ came into the 
world. And that is historical criticism! 

But the critics ask, ‘“‘Why the necessity of the 
recital of Joseph’s genealogy as applied to Jesus, 
if Jesus was not truly the son of Joseph?”” The Jews 
always reckoned genealogies by males, never by fe- 
males; so that it was but natural that Matthew, a 
Jew, should reckon by Joseph, the legal father of 
Jesus. Also Matthew was presenting Christ as the 


48 Things Fundamental 


King of Israel, so he carefully traced the genealogy 
on Joseph’s side, back through David to Abra- 
ham, to show Christ’s relation to the head of the 
Israelitish race and his claim to Israel’s throne. 

While the Kingdom of Messiah is not founded 
in natural descent, as I have already shown; while 
in that regard he had no genealogy, being without 
natural father, ‘without beginning of days or end- 
of life,’ yet it were better to have men ask, “Is 
not this the carpenter’s son?” than, ‘“‘Is not this 
the son of a harlot?” 

On the other hand, Luke, who presents Jesus 
as the Son of Man, gives the genealogy of Mary, 
through Heli her father (who was probably the 
brother of Jacob, Joseph’s father), on back beyond 
Abraham to Adam, thus emphasising the true hu- 
manity of Jesus and showing him to be the promised 
seed of the woman (Gen. ii. 15). On his mother’s 
side he was of the house and lineage of David. Luke 
i. 32 asserts Davidic descent through Mary. Con- 
nect with this verse 35, in which Mary is expressly 
told that the promised child was to have no mortal 
father, and we have both the supernatural conception 
and Davidic descent through Mary established. 
That was the consistent tradition of the Church in 
the second century, as attested by the Fathers of the 
time. And who can doubt for one moment that 
Joseph, being a strict and devout Jew, would have 
put Mary away, if he had not said, “‘ Bring her forth 
and let her be stoned,’’ as Judah did in the case of 
Tamar, if he had not been convinced beyond all 
question that Mary’s child was begotten by special 
act of God? 


The Incarnation of Christ 49 


Now, since the critics cannot deny tne world’s 
expectation of a Deliverer, nor the Jews the utter- 
ances of their prophets with reference to this De- 
liverer, Jesus is identified as “‘the desire of all na- 
tions,’” whether embodied in the Prometheus of the 
ancient Greeks, the Sraosha of the Guebers and Par- 
sees, or the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the New 
Testament writers. The problem that confronts 
us, then, is this: If the Jesus of history be not the 
Christ of prophecy, and if the kingly and priestly 
offices be not fully lodged in his hands, how shall 
we ever know if the race have a Deliverer? He was 
to be of the tribe of Judah, of the house of David, 
of the seed of Abraham. But there is not now a Jew 
under heaven, and there will never be one, who can 
establish the fact that he isa Jew. All their records 
were destroyed in the destruction of Jerusalem, 
the Jews were scattered all over the world, and 
no man can declare his generation. “Art thou 
the Christ, or look we for another?” If for “‘anoth- 
er,” we are in a hopeless state; for if he should come, 
we could not admit him to be the Messiah, since 
it could not be proved from human records that 
he is “the son of David,” “the Lion of the tribe 
of Judah,” “the seed of Abraham.” 

This plants our feet firmly on gospel ground 
and enlarges our faith in the divine Son of God, 
but we are still far from the goal; for we have yet 
to face the question of the union of the human 
and the divine in Christ. Here we have a problem 
indeed. No satisfactory explanation of it has ever 
been made. Indeed, we shall never have a thorough- 
ly comprehensible theory of it until we come to stand 

4 


50 Things Fundamental 


at last in his presence who shall open the secrets 
of all hearts and make manifest the mysteries of 
faith. If we wait, then, until this mystery is brought 
clearly within the reach of the human intellect 
before we give full faith and confidence to Jesus, we 
shall never enjoy him in this world or in the world 
to come. For the union in Christ of the two natures 
of God and man, natures so united as to form a 
single and indivisible person, is “the very apotheosis 
of the inconceivable.’ By it the human intellect 
is overwhelmed in mysteries it cannot resolve. As 
God he must be three persons in one nature; as 
man, two natures in one person. Nevertheless God 
and man, incompatible in their attributes, are codrdi- 
nated in a single being who appears upon the stage 
of human history (Fairbairn). 

Of all problems, this is beyond question the 
greatest. I would not, like some, dispose of it by 
saying that it is a subject too sacred for sane in- 
quiry and philosophical discussion, and so build 
faith on the negation of reason. I would not re- 
strict myself to what are rather contemptuously 
ealled “official decisions,’ merely for the sake 
of sparing my “naturally indolent intellect.” But 
if we reject the teachings of the Gospels and Creeds 
merely because they are inconceivable, and substi- 
tute for them the naturalistic accounts of the crit- 
ics, we are involved in a greater difficulty than ever. 
For it cannot be denied that Jesus has been at 
least as great a mystery in human history as he 
is depicted to be in the Gospels and Creeds. In uni- 
versal history he has played an even greater part 
than he did in the history of his own time. His in- 


The Incarnation of Christ 51 


fluence in history is increasing with every passing 
hour. At the beginning of the World War many men 
declared that Christianity had failed, and that the 
world was in need of something new; but, lo, when 
the war ended Christ emerged with a greater place 
in the world’s heart than he had ever known before. 

How shall we account for Christ in history? 
If we accept him at the level to which he has been 
reduced by the critics, then we must face the ques- 
tion of how this mere man came to be invested with 
such extraordinary attributes; how he in history 
has come to correspond with his fictitious rather 
than with his real character; and, finally, how 
there can be in this world of ours such blind ac- 
cident, or indifference to right, as that greater 
powers should be accorded to fiction than were ever 
granted to truth. 

Whatever we cannot embrace of this mystery 
with our minds, we must take by faith. For mani- 
festly it would be as well, as Sheldon so aptly re- 
marks, for us “to wait for a calculation of the 
size of the sun before enjoying its light and warmth, 
or for an exact determination of the distance of the 
stars before taking in the impression of majesty 
and glory which falls from the evening sky.”” From 
past experience we know that yonder sun which has 
ridden the heavens in majesty and glory for thou- 
sands of years will still shine on in resplendent 
beauty for us, as it did for our fathers, no matter 
what the mysteries surrounding it. So also we 
know that this same Christ, who constituted the 
Spiritual Rock from which the fathers drank in the 
Wilderness, will furnish living water to us in the 


52 Things Fundamental 


wilderness of this world, until we wake at last in 
his likeness in yonder distant land of light and love! - 

Nevertheless it is perfectly allowable for - one, 
in reverent spirit, to attempt a solution, that he may 
approach as nearly as one can into the presence of 
him whom no man in essence hath ever seen or can 
see. 

We have already seen how that theory which 
regards Christ as completely and only human is, 
in the light of Revelation, an impossible one. It 
now remains to be said that any theory which 
eliminates the humanity of Christ, and leaves him ~ 
completely and only God, is equally objectionable. 
If he was only God, then he was omnipresent, omnip- 
otent, and omniscient from his conception, and was 
man only in theory. In that case the Word in no 
sense “‘became flesh”; he in no sense “‘tabernacled 
among us.” But the record says that he was “‘the 
Son of Man”’; that, as such, “he grew in wisdom.”’ 
Moreover he said of himself, “But of that day and 
that hour knoweth no man, no, not even the angels 
in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” This, 
so far as omniscience is concerned, is positive proof 
that he never claimed to possess it. Yet Peter 
said to him, “Thou knowest all things.” But 
Jesus made his statement before his death and res- 
urrection; Peter, after. Again, when Pilate spoke 
of his power over Jesus, “Jesus answered, Thou 
couldest have no power at all against me, except 
it were given thee from above.”’ This is proof that 
he did not claim at that time to have all power. 
Once more, as he hung on the cross the chief priests 
mocked him, saying, “He saved others; himself he 


The Incarnation of Christ 53 


cannot save.”’ There was essential truth in that 
taunt. He came to save others; manifestly, he could 
not save himself too. 

The inevitable logic therefore is that Christ 
was not ommipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient in 
the days of his flesh. This is a necessary conces- 
sion to truth. Any descent of God into human flesh 
was not only a humiliation but a limitation of God. 
We gain nothing by keeping alive the impossible 
teachings of Docetism in claiming for Christ what 
he never once claimed for himself. He was just as 
truly and fully man as he was truly and fully God. 

Turning from the abstractions of philosophy, 
let us view the matter in the light of a simple il- 
lustration. It is said of Alfred the Great that 
he sometimes laid aside the apparel and dignity of 
his office and went out among his subjects in the 
disguise of a peasant. Here the one clothed as a 
peasant was precisely the same person as the king. 
He was still king, though he manifested himself as 
a peasant. In that garb he was peasant-king. The 
change was not in personality, but in the manner 
of manifesting that personality. In one garb he 
appeared as monarch; in the other, as peasant. 

As nearly as I have ever been able to find, this 
illustrates to me how Christ could clothe himself 
in human flesh and still be God. Subsisting in the 
form of God before the world was, his external 
characteristics were beauty, glory, and majesty. 
These, so to speak, were his robes of royalty. He 
laid them aside and put on the garment of flesh. 
He became a servant. He made himself of no repu- 
tation. In humility of heart he washed the feet 


54 Things Fundamental 


of unworthy men. He went further still, and be- 
came obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross. Having laid aside his external characteristics, — 
he also emptied himself of those attributes which 
flowed from his essence as God: omnipotence, 
omniscience, and omnipresence. Yet he was all 
the while the same divine being. It was not his 
deity, his equality with God, that he gave up, 
but the mode of his existence; not his essence, but 
the manner of its manifestation. He gave in ex- 
change for that body of humiliation the glory he 
had with the Father before the world was. He as 
God let himself down into human nature and filled 
it full. 

“Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, 
and given him a name which is above every name; 
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, 
of things in heaven, and things in earth,.and things 
under the earth; and that every tongue should con- 
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God 
the Father.’”’ (Phil. ii. 9-11.) 


CHAPTER III 
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 


CHRIST was God in unchanged essence come in 
the flesh. But we saw in the previous chapter that 
we must not build the deity at the expense of the 
humanity of Jesus, any more than we allow the crit- 
ical school to magnify the humanity at the sacri- 
fice of his deity. He was just as fully man as he 
is fully God. Any undue emphasis put upon either 
the deity or the humanity of Jesus mars the per- 
son, or makes of him what he was not 

Whether the Logos, or “‘ Word,” with whom John 
introduces his Gospel, was Hebraic or Alexandrine, 
personal rather than metaphysical, I will say no 
more than what I have said in the previous chapter. 
I leave any further discussion of it to those au- 
dacious intellects to whom metaphysical subtleties 
are attractive, or to those who have access to the 
Jewish Targums or the writings of Philo. I here con- 
tent myself with what the Evangelist gives, “The 
Word became flesh.”” This does not signify that he 
gave up what he was before; it simply asserts that, 
whatever he was, he ‘“‘became flesh.”” That indicates 
personality, for mere principle or energy could 
not become flesh. The Logos, or ‘‘Word,” then, did 
not take on personality in his incarnation; he simply 
and only changed the mode of his existence. He 
did not become ‘‘a man” merely; he became “man.”’ 
His personality as God continued, but his humanity 
was real and complete, universal and permanent. 

(55) 


56 Things Fundamental 


He appeared upon the stage of human _ history 
subject to all the conditions of human CAISVEDIEE but - 
still he never ceased to be God. 

If, then, Jesus was truly human, we may ex- 
pect to find him developing along human lines. 
And this is precisely what the record tells us: “And 
Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor 
with God and man.” (Luke ii. 52.) 

A critical study of the verb “increased” (pro- 
koptein), as used in the passage immediately above, 
reveals the fact that its usage was suggested from 
the practice of armies in cutting away obstacles 
which impede their progress. It further means “to 
lengthen out by hammering, as a smith forges — 
metals.” Also we note the “‘progressive imperfect.” 
Just as in the preceding verse his mother “ continued 
to keep (dieterez) all these sayings in her heart,” so 
here Jesus “continued to increase (proekopte) in 
wisdom and age, and in favor with God and man.”’ 
This does not indicate that the evangelist believed 
that Jesus possessed any sinecure, but rather that 
his acquisition of “wisdom” came through the hard 
school of experience—was hammered out upon the 
anvil of life. 

If, then, he zncreased in wisdom, it is evident that 
in the beginning of his temporal existence he did 
not possess all wisdom. This is verified by his own 
confession, Mark xii. 32. That he, in his pre- 
temporal existence, possessed all wisdom must be > 
granted, or else we deny that he was God. That he, 
in his temporal existence, did not possess all wisdom. 
must be granted, or else we deny that he was man. 
That there was continuity of consciousness through 


The Baptism of Jesus 57 


the period of conception is not to be believed. In 
the act of incarnation the deity surrendered his 
consciousness as God and emerged in time with his 
consciousness as man. He was born of a human 
mother, yet not in the ordinary way of generation, 
for his conception was of the Holy Ghost. Being 
human, the evangelists give us a purely human 
picture of him. 


The one glimpse we have into his boyhood shows him as a 
child his parents could lose and seek sorrowing; and in his 
manhood and public ministry he is seen to have our common 
human weaknesses. He is represented as weary, as hungry, 
as thirsty, as angry, as suffering, as in need of sympathy, 
as seeking God in prayer, as shrinking from death, as dying, 
and as dead. The attributes and the fate of universal man 
are his as they are ours.! 


“How, then,” it may be inquired, “did Christ 
come into possession again of his consciousness 
as God?” For that he had such consciousness is 
plain from the Scriptures. One has but to turn to 
Matthew xxvi. 64, Mark xiv. 62, Luke xxii. 70, to 
say nothing of many other passages, to find where 
he definitely claimed to be the Son of God. That 
was one of the charges against him at his trial. 
John vi. 62 reveals his claim of unchanged per- 
sonality; John vili. 58, his claim of timeless ex- 
istence; John xvii. 5, his consciousness of what he 
actually possessed as Eternal Word. He not only 
had this remarkable consciousness, but made his 
claims so easily and naturally that men instinc- 
tively concede his claims. 


‘Fairbairn’s ‘‘The Philosophy of the Christian Religion.” 
pages 329, 330. 


58 Things Fundamentat 


When and how did this consciousness return 
to him? If he surrendered it in the moment of 
transition from the pre-incarnate to the incarnate 
state, did it return to him immediately upon his 
emergence into the incarnate state? Was it necessary 
for him to possess such consciousness during that 
period of human infancy and weakness, while he 
was increasing in wisdom and age, and so also in 
stature? Does it add anything to the deity of 
Jesus to say that as a child he was fully conscious 
of all that he was conscious of when he had reached 
the stature of aman? If any incarnation of deity is — 
a limitation and humiliation of God, does it in- 
crease the limitation and humiliation to say that 
his consciousness as God was a gradual growth 
and development along with the growth and de- 
velopment of the man? Does it not smack of the 
apocryphal to say that Jesus had and exercised all 
the powers of deity from the cradle? That he was 
omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent from his 
birth? If that was true of him, then it is just as 
easily true that as a child he molded clay sparrows 
in the streets, then clapped his hands and caused 
them to fly away! But the Scriptures nowhere 
teach that. I have no objection to miracles when 
they can be made to serve legitimate ends, but to 
perform miracles for mere pastime, or when ordinary 
procedure would accomplish the same purpose, 
would be nothing but jugglery. 

My theory is (and with it I find nothing contradic- 
tory in Scripture) that this child, miraculously 
conceived and Virgin-born, came into this world with 
as perfect a human nature as God could make it, 


The Baptism of Jesus 59 


and with the nature, or intuition, of God dormant 
in him. He was taken to the quiet village of Naza- 
reth and given the best possible environment. He 
was watched over and carefully nurtured by the 
best possible mother. Thus this specially born, 
endowed, environed, and nurtured child was always 
able to keep that perfect poise that belonged to him 
as the Son of God. As soon as his opening mind 
would allow he was instructed in the elemen- 
tary truths of the Scriptures, and so grew in favor 
with God and man. In preparation for his appear- 
ance at the Temple, when he was to become “‘a son 
of the law,’ these same pious parents no doubt 
told him something of his mission and destiny, 
explained to him the meaning of his name “Jesus” 
and how he came to have it, and so evoked in him 
the consciousness that he sustained a peculiar re- 
lation to God as well as to mankind. Else how 
shall we account for his question to his parents at 
Jerusalem, ‘‘Wist ye not that I must be in my 
Father’s house?”’ The contention of some that their 
surprise at his question indicated that they had told 
him nothing does not hold. On the contrary, his 
question to them indicates his surprise that they, 
in the light of their own revelations to him, should 
not know exactly where to find him. 

If it be complained that I am accounting for the 
historical consciousness of Jesus on purely natural- 
listic grounds, I answer, No. One of the great 
mistakes of orthodox writers is that very often they 
have not been content with claiming enough, but 
have claimed too much. Their writings are some- 
times literally saturated with Docetism. I have 


60 Things Fundamental 


contended for the miraculous conception and essen- 
tial deity of Jesus, just as the Scriptures do. I have 
held only that the deity was necessarily limited 
in him. His personal development was not isolated, 
independent, and unrelated; no more was the de- 
velopment of his consciousness as God. That con- 
sclousness was mediated in his boyhood by the 
communications of his parents and in later manhood 
by his own study of the Scriptures. To these in- 
fluences his nature as God responded and opened, 
just as the eye responds and opens to the pulsations 
of ether waves, emerging in his boyhood and ad-— 
vancing to completion and satisfaction at his bap- 
tism, when the declaration came from the sky, 
“This is my Son.” It is a matter of wonder why 
that declaration should have been made, if he fully 
knew from the beginning what that declaration 
brought him. Had there been in him no God nature 
to respond, even that declaration could not have 
evoked in him his consciousness as God. 

What, then, was the purpose of the baptism 
of Jesus? I cannot, in passing, refrain from paying 
my respects to the endless and misguided emphasis 
laid upon it by the rabid proponents of immersion. 
This is not descending to sectarian controversy; 
for the rhetorical flourish they make over “the 
yielding wave and the liquid grave,” “being bur- 
ied with Christ in baptism,” “obeying Christ in 
baptism,” ‘‘following Christ in baptism,’ and I 
know not what else, is not doctrine at all; it is 
monumental nonsense. Such sectarian misuse of 
the baptism of Jesus leads to pharisaism and pre- 
vents that unity which Christ prayed should obtain 


The Baptism of Jesus 61 


among his followers. It really is a pity that so great 
a Christian body as the Southern Baptist Church 
should be led away into that error, along with the 
equally ludicrous fiction of ecclesiastical succession. 
If they would only read Dr. Whitsett’s ‘A Question 
in Baptist History”? and G. A. Lofton’s “English 
Baptist Reformation,” they might at least come to 
a saner view of their origin and think more soberly 
of their other brethren in Christ. 

This could not have been Christian baptism 
which Jesus recelved: 

1. Because, if, as the immersionists contend, 
baptism is the door of entrance into the visible 
Christian Church, there was no Christian Church 
in existence at the time of the baptism of Jesus, 
and hence no door to open; none to vote on him 
‘and, after baptism, receive him into full fellowship.’’ 
Jewish Church there was; Christ belonged to it— 
never to any other. 

2. Because Christ could not have been bap- 
tized in his own name. Even the contenders for 
“believers’ baptism’? would not have the courage 
to assert that a man has the authority to baptize 
until he himself has been baptized. He could not 
baptize himself, nor baptize in his own name. But 
had John Smyth, in England in the seventeenth 
century, adhered so strictly to this rule, the wonder 
esrows how the immersionist party could have 
arisen. Christ himself had no authority to issue 
orders concerning baptism until he had come into 
the place of authority. 

3. Because, if Christian baptism, it was either 
“for” or “unto” the remission of sins, according 


62 Things Fundamental 


to the school to which the immersionists belong. 
But Christ had no sins to remit. He says of him- 
self (John vili. 46): ‘‘Which of you convinceth me 
of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not be- 
lieve me?”’ To the doctrine of his sinless perfection 
Paul, John, and all the other New Testament 
writers subscribe. But it is contended that it was 
a part of his humiliation to be classed with sinners. 
The writers of the Bible Commentary, and I know 
not how many others, commenting on Matthew 
iii. 13, say: ‘In his baptism, as in his sufferings, he 
was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin.” Refer- — 
ence is here made to the language of Paul in 2 
Corinthians v. 21. But in that passage hamartia 
is equivalent to sin offering. According to the 
specifications laid down at Leviticus vi. 25, 26, the 
sin offering was bloody and the priest offering it ate 
of it. Christ was hardly a sin offering in his bap- 
tism! The rendering of Thayer, ‘He treated him, 
who knew not sin, as a sinner,” is unthinkable in 
this connection. The concession the Bible Com- 
mentary seems grudgingly to make is to my mind 
the only satisfactory explanation of it: “It is pos- 
sible that the baptism may have had a further 
signification as a consecration of our Lord to his 
mediatorial office, as the priests under the law were 
consecrated by washing (Ex. xxix. 4, xl. 12).” 

4. He could not have been baptized as an example, 
since he was baptized after all the rest. “Now 
when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, 
that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the 
heaven was opened” (Luke iil. 21). Besides, if 
“Jesus had no need of baptism himself, he could not 


The Baptism of Jesus 63 


submit to it merely as an example to others, for 
action must be dutiful to be exemplary.” We do 
not impress others with a sense of duty by doing 
what it is not our duty to do. 

5. Because clean water is distinctively the water 
of Christian baptism, and was not used until Pente- 
cost. The prophet Ezekiel, looking forward to the 
“blessings of Christ’s kingdom,” said: “‘Then will 
I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be 
clean” (Ezek. xxxvi. 25). Never until Pentecost 
was that prophecy accomplished. The water of 
purification under the Old order was mixed with 
the blood and ashes of a heifer (Num. xix. 1-10); 
under the New, it was clean. But one contends that 
John baptized with clean water. So he did; but 
his baptism was not Christian baptism; it was a 
preparatory baptism, the baptism of repentance. 
Those who received needed to be baptized again. 
Acts xix. 1-5 makes this perfectly plain. Christian 
baptism was not administered to any man until 
Pentecost, and Christ could not have received it. 

6. Because Christian baptism had not yet been 
instituted. No order for it had ever been issued. 
Authority for the administration of it was not giv- 
en until just before Christ’s ascension. As he stood 
yonder on that mountain in Galilee, preparatory to 
his flight to God, he issued the command: “‘Go ye 
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them 
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost” (Matt. xxvili. 19). Commenting 
on this passage, David Smith, in “The Days of His 
Flesh”’ (page 70), says in a note: “The Christian 


64 Things Fundamental 


Sacrament of Baptism was not instituted until 
after the Resurrection. Jesus never baptized.” 

How foolish, then, to exhort one to “‘follow 
Christ in baptism.” It simply cannot be done. 
But he was baptized. On that point there can be 
no kind of doubt. What, then, was the purpose of 
that baptism? To induct him into his priestly office 
and dedicate him to his life’s task. And to whom 
should he go for this service but to a priest? John 
was a priest of the line. He was a priest by natural 
right, for he was a Levite. ‘There was in the days of 
Herod, the king of Judea, a certain priest named 
Zacharias, of the course of Abia; and his wife was of 
the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth” 
(Luke i. 5). These were the parents of John. So 
John stood in the Aaronic succession. But Christ 
was not a priest in his own right as man. He was 
the Lion of the tribe of Judah. ‘‘And thou Bethle- 
hem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the 
princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Gov- 
ernor, that shall rule [margin, ‘‘feed’’] my people 
Israel”? (Matt. ii. 6). To become a priest after the 
manner of men, and so entitled to “feed the flock 
of God,” it was necessary for Jesus to be inducted 
into that office by one who had authority. Surely 
no contender for ecclesiastical succession would 
dispute this. ‘‘And Jesus answering said unto him, 
Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to 
fulfill all righteousness”’ (Matt. iii. 15). 

Critical examination of plerosai pasan dikatosunen 
reveals the fact that it must here mean “to fulfill 
or accomplish the law.’ Dzkaiosune unlimited 
means righteousness in general, without reference 


The Baptism of Jesus 65 


to any particular form. But there are two particular 
forms of righteousness, that righteousness which 
springs from the law and that righteousness which 
is imputed and imparted as a gift to man. Only 
the one who meets every requirement of the law, and 
stands in God’s judgment with no guilt to hide, 
has ‘‘the righteousness of the law.”’ All others who 
are accounted righteous are so accounted by “ju- 
dicial disengagement’’—a, liberation brought about 
by means of faith. If we say that Christ did not 
meet every requirement of the law, we make him 
out a sinner, and class him with the judicially 
released. That will not do. So here we must 
translate: “Jt 7s conspicuously proper for us to fill 
full the requirements of the law.”’ That baptism, 
symbolically representing to the outside world the 
inward purity and holiness of the priest, was re- 
quired of all who were to make reconciliation for 
the sins of the people. 

And how were the priests originally inducted 
into office? “‘And Aaron and his sons thou shalt 
bring unto the door of the tabernacle of the con- 
gregation, and shalt wash them with water. : 
Then shalt thou take the anointing oil, and pour 
it upon his head and anoint him” (Ex. xxix. 4-7). 
“And Moses brought Aaron and his sons, and washed 
them with water” (Lev. vill. 6). “‘And the Lord 
spake unto Moses and Aaron, saying, Take the sum 
of the sons of Kohath from among the sons of Levi, 
after their families, by the house of their fathers, 
from thirty years old [italics mine] and upward 
even until fifty years old, all that enter into the 

5 


66 Things Fundamental 


host, to do the work in the tabernacle of the con- 
gregation”’ (Num. iv. 1-3). 

Coming to the place of baptism, Jesus RapRtten 
himself to the hands of the officiating priest, not 
for the same purpose for which the rest had sub- 
mitted, but for an official purpose, and there in the 
presence of the people congregated—in a sense, at 
“the door of the tabernacle of the congregation,” 
particularly that part of the congregation ‘‘ waiting 
for the consolation of Israel”—-was washed with 
water and solemnly inducted into office and dedi- 
cated to the work of priest. The Holy Spirit in the 
shape of a dove descended upon him, taking the 
place of the anointing oil whose use had typed him, 
and the voice of God came from the sky in ac- 
knowledgment of his Sonship, thus completing his 
consciousness as God, though, as Mr. Wesley says, 
“the divine (nature) was not manifested in its 
full evidence until after his resurrection.” 

It is therefore significant that Luke, after re- 
cording the baptism of Jesus (at iii. 21), goes on 
to add (at ii. 23), “And Jesus himself began to 
be about thirty years of age.” Matthew Henry 
says: “‘At this age the priests were to enter upon 
the full execution of their office.”’ Schaff calls it 
his “‘ Messianic inauguration.” Summers says: 


The priests were washed with water upon their assumption 
of the sacerdotal office; and accordingly as the great High 
Priest of our profession, he submitted to this ceremonial 
initiation into his office. The Jewish priests were conse- 
crated at the age of thirty—the very age at which our Lord 
received baptism.2 





2“ Baptism,” page 104, 


The Baptism of Jesus 67 
So Alford: ‘ 


His baptism, as it was the Lord’s closing act of obedience 
under the law, in his hitherto concealed life of legal sub- 
mission, his fulfilling of all righteousness, so it was the solemn 
inauguration and anointing for the higher official life of 
mediatorial satisfaction which was now opening upon him. 


No other conclusion seems to me possible here but 
that the evangelist meant by this that Jesus at the 
proper age entered into the office of priest in the 
ordained way. 

And what was the work of a priest? Well, for 
one thing, and that the essential thing, he was 
to offer sacrifice for sin. And that is precisely what 
Jesus did: he offered for sin. But the sacrifice he 
offered was not for himself, but “for many,” or 
the whole mass of mankind besides himself. It 
was not the ordinary “bull” or “goat’’ that he 
offered, but himself. He was “the Lamb of God.” 
He was without flaw, so offered himself without spot 
to God. Thus the priest was transmuted into the 
sacrifice without losing his identity, just as the deity 
had been transmuted into “man” without losing 
his identity. This is precisely what he had come 
into the world to do. In his study of Old Testament 
Scriptures he recognized himself as and identified 
himself with “‘the Suffering Servant of Jehovah.’’ 
Jesus, in his opening discourse at Nazareth, as 
quoted by Luke iv. 18, 19, makes definite claim that 
the references at Isaiah lxi. 1, 2 are fulfilled in him. 
Matthew’s quotation (at vili. 17) from Isaiah liii. 4 
shows how he bore man’s sicknesses. His quotation 


3Note on Matthew iii. 13, Greek Testament. 


68 Things Fundamental 


(at xviii. 21) from Isaiah xlii. 1-4 reveals the 
program he set in operation to restore moral order 
in the world. Mark xv. 28, quoting from Isaiah 
lili, 12, identifies him with the passion. The life of 
Jesus was no experiment, feeling to find out what 
God wanted him todo. ‘He knew what his vocation 
was before he began to fulfill it.” John, at the 
baptism of Jesus, recognized him as “‘the Lamb of 
God which taketh away the sin of the world” 
(John i. 29). With that distinct consciousness 
Jesus came to his baptism. To this work he dedi- 
cated himself by entering the office of priest that he 
might be able to effect it. In him both the Mel- 
chizedekian and Aaronic priesthoods, the superior 
and the inferior, the one with and the other without 
an oath, inhere. All authority in heaven and in 
earth is his. By that authority he offered himself 
to God, and made the one oblation of himself for 
us, finished the transgression, made an end of sins 
(sin offerings), made reconciliation for iniquity, 
brought in everlasting righteousness, sealed up the 
vision and prophecy, and anointed the Most Holy. 
That was the end and aim of his baptism. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 


““TEMPTATION”’ in Scripture has a twofold signif- 
icance: (1) A trying out, or proving by test; (2) An 
incitement to evil. When it is said that ‘God can- 
not be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any 
man” (Jas. i. 13), the meaning is to be taken in 
the last sense, not in the first. When it is said 
that ‘God did tempt Abraham” (Gen. xxii. 1), the 
meaning is to be taken in the first sense, not in the 
last. That God may be “tempted” in the sense of 
tried, tested, proved is not only granted, but in- 
vited: “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, 
and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord”’ (Mal. 
iii. 10). Thus did the children of Israel tempt and 
prove God through all their wanderings in the wil- 
derness and settlement in Canaan. Thus did God 
tempt and prove Abraham. But God does not incite 
any one toevil. That work belongs to the devil. The 
devil is the tempter. He incites to evil. Every incite- 
ment to evil is of the devil. The purposes of the 
devil are always malevolent, never benevolent. ‘‘He 
never proves that he may approve nor tests that he 
may know and accept.” It is just as impossible for 
the devil to try, test, prove a person in a good sense 
as it is for God to incite one to evil. a 

The word employed in the original to designate 
the temptation of Jesus is petradzo. In the classics 
it carries a twofold meaning. In a good sense it 
means to put one to the test; in a bad sense, to seek 

(69) 


70 Things Fundamental 


to seduce to evil. In the Bible the usage is analogous, 
only more comprehensive. | 7 : 

The question immediately before us, then, is 
this: Could Jesus be tempted in the bad sense, ap- 
proached with a seduction to evil? If we adopt the 
Docetic view of him—that is, assert that he had no 
real humanity—we are bound to admit, in agreement 
with Scripture, that he could not. If we adopt the 
Ebionite view of him—that is, assert that he had 
no real deity—he could. But if we take the Docetic 
view, we run directly across the teachings of Scrip- 
ture; for the Scriptures teach that ‘‘God cannot be © 
tempted with evil,’”’ whereas the Evangelists assert 
that “Jesus was led up into the wilderness to be 
tempted of the devil.”” This petrasthenat hupo tou 
diabolou Cremer renders to tempt to sin. This is a 
necessary conclusion, since, as we have already 
seen, any test made by the devil is malevolent in 
its nature. If we turn to the Ebionite conception, 
we are in no better case, for then we shall do vio- 
lence to all those teachings of Scripture which as- 
sert that he was God. 

How are we assisted, then, if we assert, as the 
Creeds define and the Scriptures justify, that he was 
both God and man, two natures in one person? 
How is it that in ordinary man there is a higher 
and a lower nature, the higher ever leading him up 
to the true, the beautiful, and the good, the lower 
ever dragging him down to the level of hell? Wemay 
not know, we do not know, how it is, but every man 
of us is able to assert, out of his own experience, 
that it is. Now, is it the higher nature in man that 
is appealed to by lust, by an incitement to evil, 


The Temptation of Jesus 71 


or the lower? Certainly the lower. And if consent 
is given to the incitement to evil, the strength of 
the will, which is head over all, is added to the 
strength of the lower nature, and this combination 
of strength overcomes and chokes to death the high- 
er nature, leaving the mastery to the lower. So 
Jesus had in him two natures, the nature of God and 
the nature of man. The God nature led him up to the 
Father; the human nature, down to man. It was this 
lower, or human, nature in him that was tempted, ap- 
pealed to by incitement to evil. 

No doubt the difficulty many have in dealing 
with the temptation of Jesus is found in the fact 
that they fail to get the distinction between im- 
peceability and sinlessness. One who is impeccable 
is exempt from even the possibility of sin; where- 
as one who is sinless has the capacity for sin, but 
has not sinned. Where there is no possibility of 
sin, there can be no temptation. But the record says 
that Jesus was tempted; that he was tempted of the 
devil; that he was tempted in all points like as we 
are. The conclusion is therefore forced upon us that 
Jesus was peccable and temptable, but the sequel 
shows that he was sinless and holy. 

If, then, we are to get any meaning at all out 
of the temptation of Jesus, we must approach the 
study of the subject with certain definite convic- 
tions, with some questions settled: 

1. This is a real and not an imaginary conflict. 

2. That the supernatural is real. 

3. That the devil is a person. 

4, That Jesus could have yielded to the sug- 
gestions of the tempter, and so could have sinned. 


he Things Fundamental 


For to account for the temptation on natural- 
istic grounds, or to say that the whole took place 
in a trance, or that the tempter was merely some 
man, or that the suggestions of evil came from with- 
in the heart of Jesus, or that Jesus could not have 
yielded to temptation, is contrary to the whole tenor 
of the narrative, and relegates to fable the funda- 
mental doctrines of the Christian faith. 

In the temptation of Jesus we have to deal with 
a crisis in history; in fact, with the one great crisis. 
Christ, the second Adam, is on trial. This is the | 
pivotal point upon which the destiny of the world 
turns. Before it all history points forward; since, 
history points backward. The fate of the human race 
hung then and there in the balance. For what could 
the coming of Christ do to redeem the world, and al- 
leviate its miseries, if he should be overcome in 
his first issue with “the prince of this world’’? 

In Chapter III. we have seen that during the 
thirty years prior to this Jesus had been busy with 
the ordinary duties of life, with a growing con- 
sciousness of his coming ministry. Only in a single 
instance are we allowed to conjecture that he had 
any consciousness at all that his life was to reach 
into altitudes above the common level. There were 
the announcement of his birth by the angels, his 
birth in the manger, and the marvelous messages 
of John concerning him; but as to his own con- 
sciousness we are limited to the single glimpse we 
have of him in the Temple at Jerusalem, when he 
astonished the doctors with his wisdom and perplexed 
his sorrowing mother. This is all the evidence 
we have of the pent-up energies and latent powers 


The Temptation of Jesus (e: 


of this remarkable man, until we meet him at the 
Baptism. There, immediately upon that Baptism, 
the Spirit of God descended upon him out of heaven, 
and the voice of God proclaimed him his Son. 

From that supreme moment the seal of God was 
upon him. There was no longer any uncertainty as 
to his mission and ministry. The hand of God had 
definitely touched him, and he was thrilled by the 
intensity of that touch. The Spirit of God had 
filled him, and his soul was stirred to its deepest 
depths. The mantle of the High Priest was upon 
him, and he was fully awake to the awful significance 
of its meaning. Amidst the overwhelming revela- 
tions of the hour he realized the need of the secret 
place and the quiet hour, so was literally “driven” 
to the solitudes of the wilderness, in whose un- 
frequented fastnesses, away from the noise and din 
of the multitude, he might have closer and sweeter 
communion with God. | 

How human and significant this! All the great 
reforms of the world have been inaugurated, moral 
battles fought, and spiritual problems solved by men 
wrestling like Jacob in secret with God. No man 
was ever trained for a crisis except in secret, and no 
crisis was ever brought to a successful issue ex- 
cept by men so trained. They are the silent forces 
that build human character and shape the destinies 
of the world. 

Yonder in a cave, amidst the lightning-riven 
rocks and crags of old Horeb, Elijah heard “a still 
small voice” that panoplied him with power to shake 
to its foundations Ahab’s godless throne. For forty 
years Moses was trained in the solitudes of Midian 


74 Things Fundamental 


for the leadership of God’s Israel. In the quiet and 
darkness of a dungeon Joseph was prepared to be “‘a 
father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a 
ruler throughout all the land of Egypt’’—the one 
sent before of God to preserve the life of his people. 
Shut up in his room of prayer, Martin Luther re- 
ceived such a baptism of power that he broke the 
spiritual despotism of ages, and made nations re- 
joice in the liberty wherewith Christ makes men 
free. Crying, ‘‘Give me Scotland, or I die,’ John 
Knox grasped all Scotland in his stong arms of | 
prayer. Unlike the idle, fox-hunting parsons of his 
day, John Wesley breathed in the atmosphere of. 
holy love, and went out to declare afresh the doc- 
trines of “Justification by Faith” and “The Witness 
of the Spirit,” and started a revival that swept 
round the world, is sweeping, and still must sweep, 
until every land and people in the world which he 
declared to be his parish shall have received their 
baptism of power. 

To adjust himself to his life’s task Jesus went 
into this desert place to commune with God. There, 
upon that barren peak that rose like a malediction 
upon the surrounding plain, with only the fellow- 
ship of wild beasts; there, overlooking Gennesaret, 
where later the voice of the deep calling in angry 
violence to the deep should hush and the troubled 
waters calm at his bidding; there, in that solitude, 
the strength of his cable and the grip of his anchorage 
were to be tested by the supreme powers of hell. 
Michael and the dragon, the seed of the woman and 
the seed of the serpent, there met in the conflict 
that determined the fate of the race. 


The Temptation of Jesus 75 


To this conflict Jesus came as a man. As a man 
he fasted forty days and nights. He fasted and 
stood the fiery ordeal solely in his human strength. 
He had superhuman power, but he did not bring it 
into play here. If we lose sight of this fact, we miss 
the significance of the temptation. As the second 
Adam and voluntary representative of the human 
race he must stand where Adam stood. Here he 
was aman. To say that he could not have yielded 
to the suggestions of the tempter is to strip the 
temptation of all meaning and turn it into a farce. 
Jesus could have sinned. And as the first Adam was 
tempted and fell on his appetites, so the second Adam 
must first be tempted and stand or fall on his ap- 
petites. 

Here was the first point of attack. I do not agree 
with Garvie, David Smith, and others who re- 
verse the order as given by Matthew. His account 
alone appeals to me as correct, both from his use 
of terms denoting chronological sequence and ad- 
vancing order in the temptations themselves. Since 
Garvie and David Smith find the temptations in 
Israel’s expectations of the Messiah, and thus dis- 
pose of a personal devil and account for the tempta- 
tions on purely naturalistic grounds, it is to the in- 
terest of their theory to reverse the order. So 
Strauss rejected the whole narrative because he did 
not believe in any devil at all. But Matthew’s 
order comports with the whole process of salvation. 
In salvation man always comes back to God at the 
point of departure. As Adam lost his standing with 
God on the serpent’s appeal to his appetite, so 
Christ, the second Adam, fought his first battle at 


76 Things Fundamental 


the point of Adam’s departure, and recovered the 
lost field. What is more reasonable to suppose than 
that the devil, having won his first victory in that 
way, should regard it as the easiest manner of 
approach to a second victory? How adroitly 
planned! At the very moment when Christ was 
hungry, when every nerve and fiber of his being was 
racked and tortured with pain, and the cravings of 
hunger were still more excited by the loaf-like 
stones that lay at his feet, the devil, “In visible 
form,’ says Wesley, “possibly in a human shape, 
as one that desired to inquire further into the 
evidence of his being the Messiah,”’ discharged his 
first missile of destruction, “If thou be the Son of 
God, command that these stones be made bread.” 

Here everything hinges upon the interpretation 
put upon the “‘if.”’ The Bible Commentary says: 
“The words of the tempter are not intended to ex- 
press a doubt, but as an inducement to our Lord to 
exercise his divine power to relieve his hunger.” 
The rule of the grammar is: “ When the protasis of a 
conditional sentence simply states a present par- 
ticular supposition, implying nothing as to the ful- 
fillment of the condition, it has the indicative with 
et. Any form of the verb may stand in the apodo- 
sis.” That is the case here, and it seems to justify 
the conclusion of the Commentary. 

If so, then the crux of this temptation is found 
not in an effort, as has so long been supposed, to in- 
duce Christ to doubt his Sonship of which he had so 
lately been apprised, but to employ that power of 
which he was, as Son of God, in conscious possession 
to gratify, in an unlawful way, his own desires. 


The Temptation of Jesus G7 


The possession of power within itself is not an 
evil, but the use of that power may be an evil. 
For instance, I have the power to steal. The mere 
possession of that power is not an evil. God gave 
me that power. But if I employ that power in steal- 
ing, then it is an evil. God says, “‘Thou shalt not 
steal.’”’? To employ the power of which I am in pos- 
session in violation of that command would mean to 
take myself out of the hands of God, cease to de- 
pend upon him, remove myself from the category of 
manhood, and become a law unto myself—a spirit- 
ual anarchist. 

It had but lately been asserted by John Bap- 
tist that ‘‘God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham”’ (Matt. iii. 9). What harm, 
then, in employing that power to convert them into 
bread? ‘To have done so would have meant the em- 
ployment of his powers for personal, selfish ends. 
It would have meant the assertion rather than the 
sacrifice of himself. It would have meant his re- 
fusal to share the common lot, live under nature, and 
be obedient to God. Instead of pursuing that course, 
he asserts, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” 
For forty days Moses lived without it. For forty 
days Elijah lived without it. For forty days he 
himself had lived without it, and had not up to that 
hour been conscious of his want of it. How then 
shall man live? Why, as the saints in heaven live— 
by all that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. For 
forty years Israel had proved the truth of that while 
wandering in the wilderness. What folly for him 
to doubt it now! It was his business to live in 
obedience to God’s law, and it was God’s business 


78 Things Fundamental 


to take care of him. To have yielded, Christ would 
not only have set his seal to the death of the race, 
but he would have forever made impossible the 
teaching of that beautiful doctrine, “Therefore 
I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what 
ye shall eat, or what he shall drink; nor yet for 
your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life 
more than meat, and the body than raiment?” 

Foiled, but not baffled, the devil took a new 
turn on the Saviour, and made the faith and confi- 
dence in which he was so strong the basis of a second 
attack. By a winding way he led him to the pin- 
nacle of the Temple, whose lofty summit bristled 
with golden spires, and standing upon this eminence 
said to him, “Cast thyself down: for it is written, 
He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and 
in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any 
time thou dash thy foot against a stone.” 

What have we here? Is Saul also among the 
prophets? When did Satan enter the ministry? 
We read in Job that ‘‘ When the sons of God came to 
present themselves before the Lord, . . . Satan also 
came in the midst of them.”’ Is he versed in Scrip- 
ture? That is not sufficient. One may have a 
head filled with Scripture ‘notions, a mouth filled 
with Scripture quotations, and still have a heart 
full of reigning enmity to God. 

But the devil perverted the Scriptures, just as 
“the unlearned and unstable” of Paul’s day did 
“unto their own destruction.” ‘‘He shall keep thee” 
—but how? “In all thy ways,” and not otherwise. 
If one goes out of his way, out of the path of duty, 
in order to make a wanton and foolish trial and dis- 


The Temptation of Jesus 79 


play of God’s power, he forfeits the promise and 
puts himself beyond the reach of God’s protecting 
care. 

Here, again, the effort of the devil was to in- 
duce the Saviour to misuse his power, to give him- 
self up toa blind dependence rather than to a rea- 
sonable faith, to turn his confidence in God into a 
faith so blind as to become “‘a contempt of nature,” 
which would be nothing less than ‘‘dependence 
turned into sheer presumption.” 

For example, I have the power to “drink.’”’ Now 
“drink” shatters the nerves, disorganizes the body, 
enfeebles the will. I cannot hope to hold the laws 
of nature in contempt, go on in my blind folly, and 
escape the penalties that attach to that misused 
power. There is an increasingly popular notion that 
God is too good to suffer punishment to come to any 
man. ‘“‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” To 
live according to that doctrine is the grossest kind of 
presumption. With equally as much confidence I 
might persuade myself to believe that I could leap 
from the summit of the Washington Monument and 
God would send his angels to bear me up on their 
hands. But my faith in that case would avail me 
nothing. God’s power is not something to be 
tossed about, as a juggler tosses the balls in a show, 
at the will of the performer. The forces of gravity 
would snatch me up in a jiffy and grind me into a 
pulp on the pavement below. Would God be to 
blame for making the law of gravity? No, but I 
would be to blame for going out of my way to vio- 
late it. 

So, in substance, Christ answers the devil: The 


80 Things Fundamental 


Scripture you quote is true; God will make the very 
laws of nature subservient to his child, the forces 
of the universe are pledged to his support, just as 
long as he is following in the path of duty; but it 
must be kept constantly in mind that there is another 
Scripture which says, “‘Thou shalt not tempt the 
Lord thy God.” To put God to the test in a legit- 
imate way, and so prove him, is allowable; but in 
all the economy of God there is no provision for the 
salvation of the man who holds his being, physical 
or spiritual, in contempt of the laws of God. | 

Folied again, but still not defeated, the devil 
now for the first time laid aside his cloak of piety. 
Disguised as to his true nature, he had appeared 
up to that moment a pious friend and counselor. 
Had he come as Satan in the beginning, the Saviour 
must have dismissed him at once. For it is in- 
conceivable that the same person who was going to 
teach men everywhere to “avoid the very appearance 
of evil”? would consciously allow the devil to stand 
before him with repeated seductions to evil. But 
despairing of success in that guise, Satan at last 
laid aside his cloak of hypocrisy and appeared boldly 
in his true colors as the rival of God. With the 
most magnificent bribe the world has ever known or 
can know, he ambitiously and blasphemously made 
his bid for the worship of mankind. He led the 
Saviour to the summit of some high mountain, 
showed him, ‘‘in a moment of time,” says Luke, the 
kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said, 
“All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall 
down and worship me.” 

But were they Satan’s to give? Yes, for he is 


The Temptation of Jesus 81 


‘the prince of this world.’”’ But does not the Bible 
teach that “the powers that be are ordained of God’’? 
Ordained, yes, but not controlled. Satan was then, 
is now, and ever has been the chief director of the 
affairs of the kingdoms of this world. One need not 
tell me, nor seek to persuade himself to believe, 
that God controls the nations of earth while labor 
and capital are still at war, “the white slave traffic” 
runs on, and the world is still suffering from that 
hell in Europe. Just why God permits the devil 
to operate has been a question of age-long concern, 
but he does. Not content with his meddling with the 
affairs of State, he continually interferes in the 
affairs of the Church. With uncommon subtlety he 
put a sword into the hands of the Church, caused her 
to turn that sword against herself, slaughter the 
Saviour of the world, and stain her garments with 
the blood of millions of martyrs. Neither God nor 
the devil can control without the consent of the con- 
trolled. The majority of the world gives consent to 
the devil. Hence, the constitution of worldly gov- 
ernment is devil-controlled. The devil is ‘‘the 
prince of this world.”’ But he is a usurper, will ulti- 
mately be cast out, and “‘the kingdoms of the world 
will become the kingdoms of our Lord and his 
Christ.”’ 

The effort in this temptation was to induce 
Christ to misuse his power by consenting to come 
into the world’s dominion by the world’s method— 
diplomacy, or compromise with evil. 

This was the supreme temptation in the life of 
our Lord. It came to him again and again, once 
when the multitude on their way to the Passover 

6 


82 Things Fundamental 


offered to make him king. Since supremacy over 
the nations was his objective, why not take it in 
this way? 

{ have tried to represent to myself what this 
temptation meant to our Lord. I know the weakness 
of humankind for glory and power. In history I 
have followed Napoleon in his splendid campaigns, 
in which, with only 45,000 men, he met and defeat- 
ed five magnificent armies, the flower of Austrian 
manhood. I have stood with him on the bridge at 
Lodi, in the face of that withering fire that swept his — 
ranks; I have waded with him the dismal swamps of 
Arcola. In his hand he carried the sword of free- 
dom forged in the foundries of the New World. Des- 
potic Europe caught its gleam and trembled. Aus- 
tria, Russia, Germany, and England united their 
forces to oppose its conquest. Money flowed from 
the English treasury as freely as the blood did from 
her bleeding soldiery. But among them all Napoleon 
walked with a giant’s tread, and crushed them with 
as much ease as he did the vase he dashed to the 
hearth upon the dissolution of the treaty with 
England. 

But such power is a dangerous possession. It 
puts a tremendous burden upon self-restraint. It is 
a vaster force than ordinary human intelligence is 
able wisely to direct. Though a man of consummate 
skill and master of battles, he proved quite unequal 
to the task of self-mastery. Possessing power, at 
last he used it for his own selfish ends. His mind 
turned from the altogether worthy ambition to be 
“the liberator of Europe” to the insane desire to 
be “the dictator of the world.” Able to command, 


The Temptation of Jesus 83 


he felt no compulsion to obey. Feeling like a god, he 
acted like a devil. His fall was inevitable. Water- 
loo had to come. Such unrestrained power in control 
of the world would have meant nothing less than the 
devil seated on the throne of God. 

Christ was not only the Master; he was a self- 
master. He possessed supernatural powers; power 
over wind and wave, power over disease and death, 
power over devils; but he always restrained himself 
in the use of those powers. He never once used them 
for selfish ends. Though he could command a 
legion of angels to keep him from the cross, he with- 
held the command and went to the cross, where he 
died a moral rather than a physical wonder. From 
first to last of his ministry he manifested his power 
in behalf of suffering men. He never turned aside, 
except on errands of mercy; never stretched out his 
hands, except in blessing. By this unselfish living 
he exhibited a new standard of life, and is convincing 
the world more and more that the one who loses his 
life in righteous endeavor shall find it. 

The true nature of the tempter being now mani- 
fest, the Saviour no longer tolerated his presence. 
Tempted and tried to the last extreme, he rose to 
the height of his great manhood, and commanded, 
“Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt 
worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou 
serve.’ Defeated and driven out, the devil slunk 
away to the regions of the damned, and the angels 
of God came in a ministry of mercy to the suffering 
but victorious Lord! 


CHAPTER V 
THE MIRACLES OF JESUS 


CHARLES Foster KENT, in his “Origin and 
Permanent Value of the Old Testament,” par- 
aphrases a verse of one of the old hymns, “God 
moves in a natural way his wonders to perform.” 
Of course the idea back of the paraphrase is that 
God, in the formation and continuance of the 
universe, is shut up to certain modes of operation | 
which he is impotent to change, or will not change. 
He asserts that some of these modes of operation, . 
or “natural laws,” which “govern” the “evolution” 
of “the universe”’ and its “‘organic life,’ have been 
“distinguished” and found “wonderful” and “awe- 
inspiring,’”” so much so that we have come “‘to ap- 
preciate the sublimity and divinity of the natural.” 
As a result of these remarkable discoveries he goes 
on to say that “we have abandoned the grotesque 
theories held by primitive men,” and no longer 
demand ‘‘a supernatural origin for our sacred 
books before we are ready to revere and obey their 
commands.” In this position he is in exact agree- 
ment with Huxley, Harnack, Hume, Schmiedel, 
Weinel, Spencer, Wellhausen, Eichhorn, and all 
the rationalists and infidels of the world. They 
all rule the supernatural and miraculous out of 
court, while they transfer to nature all the powers of 
deity. If Professor Kent finds congenial fellowship 
in that company, it is no affair of mine, but with all 
my heart I protest against his classification with the 
apostles and prophets of Jesus. So much for the 


(84) 


The Miracles of Jesus 85 


“Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature in Yale 
University.” 

David Hume grounds his argument against 
miracles on human experience. He says that “no 
testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle’; that 
a miracle is “a violation of the laws of nature’; 
that the experience of nature is ‘‘firm and unalter- 
able’; and that the course of nature ‘‘admits of no 
exception.’’ In other words, since “the experience 
of nature”’ is always the same, and that experience 
is against the niracle, if every man on earth should 
testify as to the occurrence of a miracle, that testi- 
mony could not be made to weigh against “the 
experience of nature.”’ It would simply be one 
universal against another, and that would not es- 
tablish a “proof,” as there must be a preponderance 
of evidence before a case can be made out. Here he 
has committed the usual blunder of the skeptic and 
made his own knowledge and observation the ex- 
clusive measure of certainty, like the king of Siam 
who, it is said, rejected the statement of the Dutch 
representative at his court that the water in his 
country “sometimes congealed into a solid mass.” 
That was contrary to ‘“‘the experience of nature”’ 
in Siam, so the king rejected the testimony. Simi- 
larly also Harnack held that, ‘“‘as breaches in the 
continuity of nature, there can be no miracles,’ 
for “the continuity of nature is unbreakable.” 
Huxley did not deny the possibility of miracles, 
but the sufficiency of the evidence. 

To use the rather terse expression of Lord Bacon, 
this “resembles a magnificent structure that has 
no foundation.” Their zeal was worthy of a better 


86 Things Fundamental 


cause, for, in the vivid language of Victor Hugo, 
“They confound with the constellations of pro- 
fundity the stars which the ducks’ feet make in the 
soft mud of the pond.” The merest tyro is able to 
see that they have confused the ethical and physical 
parts of ‘‘nature”’ and carried over from the ethical 
into the physical the idea of compulsion and trans- 
lated it into an ordinance which nature must obey. 
That the course of nature ‘‘admits of no exception” 
is an assumption. The assumption is not true. 
Heat expands and cold contracts bodies, is a general | 
law of physics, but it is not universal. Water, 
melted iron, lead, bismuth, and rubber are all ex- 
ceptions. Liquids become heavier on cooling, is 
another general law of physics, but water is an ex- 
ception to that rule. The law holds good up to a 
certain point, but not beyond it. Any given plant 
will year after year produce the same kind of bud, 
is a general law of plant life; but the exceptions to 
this rule give us, according to the evolutionists 
themselves, all the varieties of the floral kingdom. 
(See Darwin’s “Origin of Species,”’ pages 9 and 38.) 
That the experience of nature is “firm and un- 
alterable” is a gratuitous statement. There is no 
proof for it. On the other hand, there are proofs 
against it. There have been formidable breaks in 
nature. Granting that matter has always been here 
and the evolutionary process in force, the formation 
of the visible universe out of the original mass, the 
first introduction of life upon the earth and the 
coming of man, each in its turn constituted an 
“experience of nature” different from anything 
that went before, and therefore made a “break’’ 


The Miracles of Jesus 87 


in “the continuity of nature.” How explain them? 
Were they ‘miraculous interventions,’ or mere 
“accidents”? in the evolutionary process? Those 
who destroy miracles must not perform them. Thus 
one is able to see to what desperate straits the 
rationalistic school is driven. Yet in spite of the 
contradictions of this absurd system this character 
of thought has been allowed to work, like the leaven 
of the Pharisees against which Jesus warned his 
disciples, until it has well-nigh leavened the whole 
lump of thought at the present day. Ministers of 
the gospel, themselves ignorant or timid in the 
presence of the overmastering egotism of “learning’”’ 
(falsely so called), have either made unconditional 
surrender to the enemy, or closed up like clams, 
until in many places the modern pulpit has become 
the throne of higher criticism and Christian teaching 
the handmaid of infidel philosophy. 

That a miracle is “a violation of the laws of 
nature’”’ is also assumption. I deny that in naked 
nature herself there is no suspension of her laws. 
The chemical forces are constantly interfering with 
the mechanical; the vital, with the chemical. The 
activities of some laws are suspended for the opera- 
tion of other and superior laws. For example, take 
some copper filings and powdered sulphur and mix 
them thoroughly together. It is a mere mechanical 
process, yet by it each of the original substances 
loses its identity as to color, and to the naked 
eye there appears a greenish mass. If examined 
under the glass, each of the original substances may 
be seen, their particles side by side. Without the 
introduction of a higher principle they would rest in 


88 Things Fundamental 


that position forever. In other words, they would. 
remain subject to the laws that operate in that realm. 
Now let the mixture be gradually heated until it 
glows. In that process the particles of the two sub- 
stances are fused; and if the glass be turned upon 
it, one will not be able to distinguish the original 
substances as such, but instead a black mass (copper 
sulphide) possessing properties entirely different 
from the constituent substances. How was it ac- 
complished? By the introduction of a superior 
force into the mechanical realm. The mechanical — 
forces were suspended by the superior chemical 
forces. In the mechanical world it might be called a 
miracle; in the chemical, it is a natural consequence. 
Or, if a corn of wheat be laid up in some dry place, 
with the expectation that it will sprout and grow, 
that expectation will be disappointed. - Why will 
they not grow? Conditions necessary for the opera- 
tion of higher laws are wanting. Let the corn of 
wheat be put in the earth, let the rains descend and 
the sun’s rays beat upon it, and soon there will be a 
wonderful manifestation. A tiny shoot, having 
overcome the mechanical force of gravity, will 
appear above the earth, and thus continue to grow. 
Moreover it will send its roots down into the soil, 
seize and utilize the dead minerals of the earth, 
passing them up from an inorganic to an organic 
kingdom, from a dead to a living world. How is it 
done? By the introduction of the vital principle 
into the mechanical and chemical realms. In the 
mechanical and chemical worlds that might be 
called a miracle; but in the vital world it is a natural 


consequence. 


The Miracles of Jesus. 89 


But lest there be some misunderstanding about 
these “laws” of which I have been speaking, let 
me say that “laws” in physical nature do not 
“‘govern”’ in the sense of “causing.” <A ball will 
lie still forever unless acted upon by some external 
force, and when put in motion will move on forever 
in a straight line unless acted upon by another 
external force. It has within itself power neither to 
start nor to stop. The “law” is merely the state- 
ment of what is observed to occur when the external 
force has acted. The force that acts directly may it- 
self be physical, but back of that force is another, 
and so on, until it ends in the force of a personal will, 
into which all force is at last resolvable. Only a 
personal will can originate—“‘cause’—anything. 
The law of gravity is constantly acting, drawing to 
the earth all material objects; but no force of gravity 
has ever yet been observed to pull a flying eagle 
down out of the sky. 

It is the most natural thing in the world for 
water to run downhill, but that does not mean that 
it must always run downhill. The fact is, it must not 
do anything of the kind. It is under no compulsion 
to run at all. For immediately that man appears 
upon the scene he is able to change the course of 
nature, and make water run uphill, or stop it from 
running altogether, or start it to running again. 
Man is in nature. He belongs to nature. Heisa 
constituent part of nature. He is just as natural as 
the rock, or the water. Yet he is the master of 
nature, even of himself. To use again Lord Bacon’s 
words, nature “is bound, and tortured, pressed, 
forced, and turned out of her course by art and 


90 Things Fundamental 


human industry”’ (“Novum Organum,” page 17). 
Man tunnels the mountains, bridges the chasms, 
presses the subtle forces of nature into his service, 
and sails the seas. He carves the stone, nature’s 
product, into a thing of beauty, and out of it builds 
magnificent pantheons, then in a mad fit lays waste 
the highest achievements of centuries through the 
ravages of war. 

And from the very fact that “the force of per- 
sonality and character” is able to change, direct, 
control, and dominate nature—all nature—I hold 
that no law of evolution is possible in human history, 
and that the historian who takes over from physical . 
science the principle of causality in its modern form 
and attempts to make it hold good in history, enters 
upon a fool’s path which can but end in negations 
and dreary voids. For it, as we have already seen, 
there were formidable breaks in the evolution 
(granting the theory) of physical nature which 
must be accounted for either by ‘miraculous inter- 
vention”’ or ‘‘accident,’”’ so also there are formida- 
ble breaks in history which must be accounted for 
in the same way. Draper, in his “Conflict Between 
Religion and Science,” giving indorsement to the 
Stoic principle of “‘irresistible necessity,’ which he 
legitimately if strangely supports by the “stoical 
austerity”’ of Calvin’s doctrine of “election,” as- 
serts that “the course of nations, and indeed the 
progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance 
or random way, that supernatural interventions 
never break the chain of historic acts, that every 
historic event has its warrant in some preceding 
event, and gives warrant to others that are to follow.” 


The Miracles of Jesus 91 


Narrowing his argument to the personal life, he 
says: “The intelligent man knows well that, in his 
personal behoof, the course of nature has never been 
checked; for him no miracle has ever been worked; 
he attributes justly every event of his life to some 
antecedent event; this he looks upon as the cause, 
that as the consequence” (pages 251, 252). Being 
a true supralapsarian, he holds that there was no 
liberty in man from the beginning, but that every- 
thing has been done according to the arbitrary will 
of God. Adam did what he did under iron necessity. 
God decreed it. This makes God guilty of all the 
crimes in human history. He was responsible for 
the slaughter of the Huguenots at St. Bartholomew, 
which Pope Gregory XIII. commemorated by a 
medal and by a Te Dewm in the churches. He was 
responsible for the world tragedy of 1914, the most 
colossal crime in human history. If so, then human 
responsibility is a myth, and criminal codes built 
upon that idea are monstrous injustices! 

Taking the two quoted statements in their inverse 
order, let me say first that, in saying “the intelligent 
man knows that no miracle was ever worked for 
him,” he becomes responsible for an assertion which 
he can neither prove nor know. If he had said that 
no miracle had ever been worked in his own behalf, 
I should be forced to accept his statement without 
question; but when he asserts that no intelligent 
man has ever had a miracle worked for him, he 
usurps my prerogatives and presumes to speak for 
me; and not for me alone, but for the whole class 
of intelligent men. Was the leper whom Jesus 
cleansed (Matt. viii. 2-4) an intelligent man? Was 


92 Things Fundamental 


the paralytic whom Jesus healed (Matt. ix. 2-8) 
an intelligent man? I know not what his mental 
condition was, but the record says that “‘when the 
multitudes saw it, they marveled and glorified God.’’ 
Was the impotent man whom Jesus restored at the 
pool of Bethesda (John v. 1-17) an intelligent man? 
He was intelligent enough in his talk: “‘ He that made 
me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, 
and walk.” Was the man who was born blind, 
whose eyes Jesus opened (John ix. 1-27), an in-— 
telligent man? He said to the Jews: “‘Whether he 
be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that, 
whereas I was blind, now I see.’’ In that he dis- 
plays a greater power of reasoning than the author 
of “Conflict Between Religion and Science.” Was 
Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, an in- 
telligent man? The evidence by which he arrived 
at the conclusion that Jesus was a teacher come from 
God was the miracles which attended his ministry. 
But here is a modern test. Take a man—a drunk- 
en, bloated, beastly wreck of humanity. The 
habits of years have forged great chains upon him. 
He resolves to quit, but his will is weak, and his 
resolutions won’t save him. He tries the “cures,” 
but the old appetite is too strong for him; once more 
he lapses and is found lingering at the wine. Out 
of pity for him human society says, “We will make 
laws to protect this poor man.” So they write a 
temperance statute upon the books, with severe 
penalties attached. But somehow liquor, which 
breaks every law of God and man, and in its diabo- 
lism out-devils the devil, gets to him and he plunges 
on down the way to ruin and despair. To him there 


The Miracles of Jesus 93 


is but one law of life. The “‘cures’” cannot save 
him. “Law” cannot save him. Man cannot save 
him. He cannot save himself. Is there no escape 
from the inevitable? Liquor is the cause. Is a 
drunkard’s death the iron decree? No, there is the 
power of God. He hears the story of that infinite 
pity which nailed the Son of God to the cross of 
Calvary. He believes. He yields. The spiritual 
forces of the upper world reach down, enfold him, 
gather him up, break his fetters, give strength to 
his will, put power in his heart, and set his feet to 
walk in newness of life. This has come to pass 
over and over again in the experience of men, 
as can be attested by a multitude of witnesses 
living and dead. To assert that no miracle was 
worked in their behalf is to fly in the face of all 
reason. How was it done? By the introduction of 
a spiritual principle into the vital realm. With man 
it is a miracle; with God a natural consequence of 
his power. 

Man requires the aid of a power beyond his own. 
Just as physical nature has never been observed to 
reach her best except by the intervention of man, 
so man has never been observed to reach his best 
except through the intervention of God. This want 
of man is indicated by the custom of prayer. Prayer 
presupposes a belief in at least the possibility of 
divine intervention. And as practically the whole 
mass of mankind, wherever found, have been ob- 
served in the practice of prayer—which is just as 
much “the experience of nature” as anything else— 
it amounts to a presumption equal to a moral cer- 


94 Things Fundamental 


tainty that such intervention is not only possible 
and probable, but necessary and frequent. 

Coming to the second statement, that no super- 
natural interventions ever break the chain of his- 
toric events, let me say first that, if mere men are 
constantly reaching results which the ordinary 
processes of nature never would or could have pro- 
duced, is it not an inevitable conclusion that God 
sometimes reaches results that are not only super- 
natural but superhuman? If there is a God at all, 
and he is in any intelligible sense the Creator and 
sustainer of the universe, where is the ground for 
rejecting the supernatural and miraculous? Being 
a person, and therefore free to act, is it not absurd 
to conclude that he can not and does not sometimes 
change the ordinary processes and manifest himself 
in unusual ways? Standing before the Diet at 
Worms, a lone monk cried: “‘Here I stand. I cannot 
do otherwise. God help me. Amen.” God did 
help him, and from that hour it became possible 
for men in this world to worship God as they please. 
The course of history was changed. John Wesley 
said: “Give me one hundred men who fear nothing 
but God, who hate nothing but sin, and who are 
determined to know nothing among men but Jesus 
Christ and him crucified, and I will set the world on 
fire.’ He did set the world on fire, and changed 
the course of history. What of the Spanish Armada? 
Out of the Tagus it sailed in all of its supposed 
invincibility May 29, 1588, to “reverse the wheels of, 
English Protestantism” and “restore the shattered 
dominions of Catholicism.” On the first day out a 
storm arose of such violence as to shatter its arma- 


The Miracles of Jesus 95 


ment and force it to put back to port for repairs. 
When it came out again into the open sea, Lord How- 
ard, with “the will to conquer or to die,” poured his 
broadsides with such terrible effect upon it that it 
was shattered and forced to seek safety in flight 
around the north of Scotland, where the storm- 
winds from the Orkneys completed “the wreck of 
what had been spared by English audacity.”” And 
what of Waterloo? Victor Hugo pointedly asks, 
“Was it possible for Napoleon to win the battle? 
We answer in the negative. Why? On account of 
Wellington, on account of Bliicher? No; on account 
of God.” Of course his opinion determines nothing 
except that there are great minds who do believe 
that there is a superintending providence which 
sometimes intervenes in human affairs, and that 
such an action as “Waterloo is not a battle, but a 
transformation of the universe.’”’ Who that has 
passed through the World War will assert that civili- 
zation was not saved by the intervention of God? 

I contend that the Bible itself is of necessity of 
supernatural origin, and is therefore a stupendous 
miracle: (1) Because it deals with ideas which le 
beyond the recognition of the physical senses. Man 
by searching could not have found out God, nor 
his ways and purposes. They had to be revealed to 
him. (2) Because there are laws laid down in wt which 
sinful man never would have written except at the 
command of his Creator. (3) Because the events 
foretold in tt have been faithfully fulfilled in human 
history. (4) Because it alone of all books is an in- 
fallible guide to man through the gross moral darkness 
of this world. I still hold to the “grotesque” theory 


96 Things Fundamental 


of “primitive men,” that holy men of old spake as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost, and “revere”’ 
the sacred book because it is the supernatural gift 
of God to man, and seek to obey its “‘commands”’ 
because they are the revealed will of God and not 
the vaporings of finite minds. 

The arguments of these rationalists hold good 
only on the theory that there is no God. They 
divorce experience from all rational expectation 
drawn from any other source. They view the 
miracle simply as “a naked marvel.” They shut 
their eyes to all evidence that may be drawn from 
its possible design. They grit their teeth and assert 
that such a thing cannot be, because, as they assume, 
it is not in “the order of nature.” Their argument 
breaks down in the fact that they presume to know 
what “the order of nature” is, whereas they can 
know but very little. Man cannot know what the 
order of nature is beyond his own experience. He 
may assume, but assumption is not fact. So far 
as we know, it may be the order of nature, and it 
doubtless is, for the spiritual forces of the universe 


to supersede the vital, as the vital do the chemical 


and the chemical the mechanical. At any rate that 
is most agreeable to the facts so far as we know them, 
and upon that Christianity takes its stand. 

Semeton, translated “‘miracle’”’ in the Scriptures, 
is the common generic term by which all super- 
natural works are designated. In the Old Testa- 
ment it is used to denote the divine pledge to the 
confirmation of some promise or covenant. For 
example, in Genesis iv. 15 “the Lord set a mark 
(semeion) upon Cain,” as a pledge of his protection. 


 ———— - 


The Miracles of Jesus 97 


In Genesis ix. 13 God set his “bow in the cloud,” as 
“a token (semeion) of the covenant”? between him 
and the earth. In Genesis xvii. 11 God gave the 
rite of circumcision to Abraham, which was “a 
token” (semeion) of the covenant between him and 
Abraham’s seed forever. In the New Testament the 
term is applied particularly to the works of our Lord, 
and not without great reason and _ significance. 
I have already pointed out that the evidence by 
which Nicodemus arrived at the conclusion that 
Jesus was ‘‘a teacher come from God” was the 
“sions”? which attended his ministry. The first 
miracle he wrought in Cana of Galilee John calls 
“the beginning of signs’; the healing of the cen- 
turion’s son, “the second sign.’’ Why this par- 
ticularity? It is to call our attention to the fact 
that these are “indications,”’ “‘evidences,” ‘‘seals,’’ 
“sions,” “proofs” that the one wielding these 
powers is wielding powers that belong only to God 
and is supported with divine inspiration and author- 
ity. Semeion is that by which a work or ministry 
is authenticated or proved. ‘Miracles were the 
attestations by God of the commission of him who 
represented himself as bearing a message from God 
to men. . . . Their testimony thus was not 
immediately and directly to the doctrine taught by 
the messenger, but rather to the messenger him- 
self, and through him they stamped his message 
as from God.” (Taylor.) These were his creden- 
tials. Just as surely as the “mark” of Cain at- 
tested God’s protection, the “bow” of Noah pro- 
claimed God’s promise, and the “‘circumcision”’ 
7 


98 Things Fundamental 


of Abraham revealed God’s mercy, just so surely 
were the miracles of Jesus the tokens of his deity. 

That this is the clear implication of the term 
is seen from a consideration of two other words used 
in the Gospels, dynameis and orga, signifying re- 
spectively powers, faculties, capacities for doing 
(things), and works, results, both closely related and 
interdependent. Whenever a faculty, capacity, or 
power is exerted, it invariably issues in a work or 
result; and vice versa, a result is prima facie evidence 
of the existence and exertion of power. The opening 
of blinded eyes, the unstopping of deafened ears, 
the unloosing of dumb tongues, the restoring of 
diseased bodies, and the raising of the dead—all 
wrought in the open and before the startled gaze of - 
the multitudes—are results which proclaim the 
existence and exertion of powers which do not belong 
to nature, animate or inanimate, and justify the 
conclusion of Nicodemus that God was with this 
Rabbi. 

Just in this connection it is well to call attention 
to the use of another word in the Gospels, exousia, 
translated “authority” twenty-nine times in the 
New Testament. Those who witnessed his driving 
the unclean spirit out of the man in the synagogue 
at Capernaum (Mark i. 27) said of Jesus, “‘ For with 
authority commandeth he the unclean spirits, and 
they obey him.” The distinction between dyna- 
mis and exousia is this: Dynamis denotes posses- 
sion of the ability to make power felt, while exousia 
means free movement in the exercise of that ability. 
Jesus therefore not only possessed supernatural 
power, but was free in the exercise of that power. 


The Miracles of Jesus Sh 


27 oe Se 66 


These ‘powers, works, signs,’ and “‘au- 
thority” of Jesus were natural and necessary to him. 
They were expected of the Messiah. The Old 
Testament was full of “signs,’’ and it was believed 
that when the Messiah should come he would bring 
certain pledges of the truth of his teaching. The 
administration of water to the Jews in baptism was 
one of them. But neither that nor any of the other 
“signs’’ which attended his ministry was sufficient 
for them. The Jews were constantly demanding a 
“sion.”’? In Matthew xii. 38 we are told that certain 
of the Scribes and Pharisees said to him, “ Master, 
we would see a sign from thee.” Again, at John 
li. 18, the Jews said to him: “What sign showest 
thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?” 
Once more, John vi. 30, they said unto him: “ What 
sign showest thou then, that we may see, and be- 
lieve thee? What dost thou work?” Not only did 
the Jews constantly expect and urge “a sign,” but 
the most merciless temptation of the devil was 
directed along precisely the same line, to induce 
him to go out of his natural course to make some 
wanton display of his power to prove his Messiah- 
ship. “The herald of a divine dispensation must 
have proof to offer that he does come from God,”’ 
otherwise his claims are prostituted and his career 
ends in ignominious defeat. Both Jesus and the dev- 
il were aware of this; hence, the peculiar severity 
of this temptation. Yet Jesus was so splendidly 
poised that he never once went out of his way to 
manifest his supernatural power. 

Now as to the sufficiency of the testimony, we 
have first to consider that of Jesus himself. When 


99 6k 


100 Things Fundamental 


John Baptist, from his place in prison, sent his 
disciples to ask, “Art thou he that should come, 
or do we look for another?” he said, “‘Go and tell 
John what things ye have seen and heard; how that 
the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
the deaf hear, and the dead are raised”? (Luke vil. 
19-23). On another occasion he said to the Jews: 
“T have greater witness than that of John; for the 
works which the Father hath given me to finish, 
the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that 
the Father hath sent me” (John v. 36). Other 
instances might be cited, but these are sufficient. 
In making this claim he was either telling the truth, 
deceiving, or deceived. First, the presumption must 
be that he was telling the truth. If, according to the 
rule of the court, a person on trial for a crime must 
be presumed to be innocent until he is proven guilty, so 
also a witness should be presumed to be speak- 
ing the truth until the falsity of his evidence has 
been established. If deceiving, how is it that the 
purest morality the world has ever had came from a 
man so dishonest? If deceived, was he a visionary, 
an enthusiast, a dreamer, believing himself to possess 
powers which he really did not have? So some of the 
critics hold. How is it that an intellect so admirably 
balanced as never to be moved by caprice or swept 
away by impulse could have become the victim of 
such a hallucination? Ingersoll wrote a book on 
“The Mistakes of Moses,” but who has attempted 
a book on “The Mistakes of Jesus’? Who has 
ever read the record and sat down and written, 
“Jesus ought not to have said this?” Who will 
read the record and write, “Here is something Jesus 


The Miracles of Jesus 101 


did not say that he should have said,” specifying 
what it is? I tell you that Jesus spake with divine 
authority. What he omitted need not be said, and 
what he said is the ultimate reach of wisdom. Even 
Renan, in his “Life of Jesus,’ has said that “‘his 
admirable good sense guided him with marvelous 
certainty’; that “his leading quality was an in- 
finite delicacy’’; and that “‘he laid with rare fore- 
thought the foundations of a church destined to 
endure.”’ Either the critics must acknowledge that 
he was not deceived, or give up their belief in his 
intellectual soundness. They cannot hold on to 
both. | 

To the testimony of Jesus must be added that 
of the apostles. On the day of Pentecost Peter 
said to the wondering multitude in description of 
Jesus that he was “‘a man approved of God among 
you by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God 
did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also 
know” (Acts ii. 22). And toward the close of his 
life, after a long and fruitful, if hard, ministry, he 
could still say, “‘For we have not followed cunningly 
devised fables, when we made known unto you the 
power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but 
were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. i. 16). 
The apostle John testifies after this fashion: ‘That 
which was from the beginning, which we have heard, 
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have 
looked upon, and our hands have handled of the 
word of life; that which we have seen and heard 
declare we unto you” (1 John i. 1-3). Thomas, the 
doubting apostle, after witnessing the most in- 
credible of all the miracles, was convinced, and cried, 


102 Things Fundamental 


“My Lord and my God.” Of these the same may be. 
said as was said of Jesus, that they were either 
telling the truth, deceiving, or deceived. If deceiving, 
why is it that they followed their deceptions even 
to their own deaths? It is incredible that they 
should deliberately manufacture a lie and die in 
defense of it, without one man of them having in 
self-interest turned ‘informer’ and betrayed the 
rest. Were they deceived? Their writings give no 
indications whatever that they could be easily im- 
posed upon. I do not understand how any unprej- — 
udiced man can read their testimony without the 
impression that they are giving a straightforward 
account of the ministry of Jesus. To say that they 
lived in a miracle-mongering age and were so in- 
fluenced by their environment as to be incapable 
of putting the proper value upon evidence, is to do 
them the rankest kind of injustice. They never once 
attributed a miracle to John Baptist, and plainly 
show that even the miracles of Jesus were hindered 
by unbelief. All the indications are that they were 
telling the truth. 

To the testimony of the apostles must be added 
the witness of profane history. I adduce only one. 
Josephus, in his ‘‘ Antiquities” (Book xvili., chapter 
v., page 548), says: 

Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be 
lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works 
[italics mine], a teacher of such men as receive the truth with 
pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and 
many of the Gentiles. He was Christ; and when Pilate, at 
the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned 


him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not 
forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third 


The Miracles of Jesus 103 


day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thou- 
sand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribes of 
Christians, so named for him, are not extinct to this day. 


Born 37 A.D., and died 95 A.D., Josephus lived 
in the midst of those stirring times. A member 
of ‘a sacerdotal family,” of “the chief family of 
the first course,” through his mother “of royal 
blood,” it may be presumed that he was qualified to 
be a historian of no mean ability; that he had no 
bias in favor of Jesus; that he was well acquainted 
with current events; and that here he gives simple 
utterance to the truth. If his witness is not to be 
believed, then it is useless to bring forward any 
other. 

Finally, if all the testimony concerning the mir- 
acles of Jesus is to be set aside and rejected as un- 
trustworthy and insufficient, it is not possible to 
establish anything by human witnesses, and all 
human history stands discredited. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE COMING KINGDOM 


DURING the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount 
Jesus taught his disciples a prayer (Matt. vi. 9-18). 
The petitions of this prayer are seven. The first 
three deal exclusively with God: (1) ‘‘Thy name be 
hallowed”; (2) “Thy kingdom come’; (8) “Thy 
will be done.”? And it is seen that these occur in a 
descending scale, from himself down to the manifes- 
tation of himself in his earthly kingdom, and from 
his manifestation on down to his complete control of 
all human hearts. | 

The other four petitions have to do exclusively 
with men: (1) “Give us our daily bread’; (2) “For- 
give our debts’’; (3) “Lead us not unto temptation”’; 
(4) ‘Deliver us from evil.”’ These, one observes, are 
ranged in an ascending scale, from the satisfaction 
of bodily want up to man’s deliverance from all ill. 

This arrangement is not mechanical, nor acci- 
dental. God in his descent to man and man in his as- 
cent to God meet in a kingdom, where God holds su- 
preme sway over willing subjects whose hearts can- 
not delight in evil nor rejoice at another’s pain, 
but whose aspiration is universal beneficence. 

“Thy kingdom come” is the chief of all the pe- 
titions of this incomparable prayer, the one whose 
undertone is heard through all the rest. It reaches 
down and undergirds man, reaches up and embraces 
God, and brings Sovereign and subject together in 
harmonious relationship. It embodies the most an- 


(104) 


The Coming Kingdom 105 


imating thought in the whole wide range of aspira- 
tion, for it contemplates a world in which one spir- 
it rules, and all men, in spite of accident of birth 
or circumstance of fortune, move with a common and 
a righteous impulse. 

But what is this kingdom for whose coming Jesus 
taught his disciples to pray? Evidently nothing like 
it had ever existed in the world, else it could not 
have been a coming kingdom. ‘True, the kingdom in 
inward reality had existed in the world ever since 
there were men who “walked with God,” as Enoch 
did, and “‘waited for his salvation,” as Simeon did, 
as that whole catalogue of “the heroes of faith” 
recited in Hebrews xi. fully attests; but the king- 
dom as contemplated by Jesus in this petition had 
never been in existence. The Jews of that day even 
looked forward to its coming. ‘The prophets had 
ingrained in Jewish thought that national religious 
hope. Some thought it would only mean deliverance 
from the Roman yoke, despotic Roman officials, and 
taxgatherers; some thought it would mean the ex- 
pulsion of apostates and the bringing of all Israel 
to a complete outward obedience to the law; while 
others thought it would mean a revival of true piety 
and holiness. But the idea, whatever it was, was 
comprehensive, always collective, a hope involv- 
ing the whole nation, that of a kingdom not gross- 
ly secular, yet distinctly worldly. And just when 
the expectation of the Jews was keenest they were 
startled by the exhortation of John, the forerunner of 
Jesus: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand.” With this exhortation of John’s ministry the 
first exhortation of Christ’s ministry was identical. 


106 Things Fundamental 


But what was this kingdom for whose coming men. 
were to prepare by ‘“‘a change of heart’? Jesus said 
to Pilate, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’”’ Are 
we to suppose from this that Jesus had reference only 
to a purely ideal state which would have no earth- 
ly expression as a society and would only realize 
itself in another world? No, he did not mean that. 
The kingdom which he contemplated by this petition 
was a kingdom in the world, yet not of tt. His re- 
jection of the tempter clearly revealed that he re- 
jected the methods of deceit and violence employed 
by the kingdoms of the world. He would not build 
up his kingdom by the use of hate and blood. He 
would not accept kingship over the nations as they 
then stood constituted, because they had been built 
up in that way. He sent away his disciples by boat 
and himself went up into a mountain to pray when 
the tempting multitudes on their way to the Passover 
offered to make him king. His was to be a kingdom 
established by a different process. He rebuked Pe- 
ter for violence. All kingdoms established after that 
fashion must perish. He would have none of that, 
for his was to be “‘an everlasting kingdom.” He 
deliberately flung away the sword, symbol of con- 
quest, and lifted up the cross, symbol of service. He 
resorted not to carnal weapons, but employed the 
power of bleeding love. He spurned the crown that 
is won by rebellion and revolution and received the 
crown that is won by vicarious sacrifice. His course 
had no parallel at all in the world. The story of it is 
“the supreme drama of history.”” With open hand, 
defenseless, unarmed, he marched upon the en- 
trenchments of evil to conquer by love and establish 


The Coming Kingdom 107 


a kingdom in which all men would be brothers; a 
kingdom from which the wicked in his sins should 
be excluded, but into which the most ‘“‘violent’’ 
might enter by a “‘new birth” and become holy; a 
kingdom not of race, nor of place, nor of enforced 
subjection, but a universal society of men living as 
the sons of God, with all relations realized in time as 
though they were in eternity; and, finally, a king- 
dom not bounded by time and sense, but stretching 
forward to final consummation in that new and 
better state beyond the valley of the shadow of 
death. — 

But a kingdom implies a king. Who is the king 
of the kingdom? Jesus is the King of the kingdom. 
He holds authority from the Father. He said to Pi- 
late: “I ama king. To this end was I born, and 
for this cause came I into the world.” Much 
of the preaching of our day lays emphasis upon 
Jesus as teacher. He was a teacher, the greatest 
of all teachers. “‘Never man spake as this man.” 
Into his incomparable philosophy he crowded all the 
wisdom of God. But Jesus was more than a teacher. 
Still others lay stress upon Jesus asareformer. Even 
the modern Socialists claim him. But modern 
Socialism is fundamentally atheistic, and to root the 
kingdom of God in that soil would be like planting a 
tree in a bed of salt and expecting fruit from it. 
Many reforms have grown out of his ministry, but 
Jesus was not a reformer. He was not an initiator, 
but a propagator; not an innovator, but a consumma- 
tor. Every last principle of his doctrine was fore- 
shadowed in the Old Testament. He himself said 
that he came not to destroy, but to fulfill. He stead- 


108 Things Fundamental 


fastly refused to be a divider among his brethren. 
He declined even to order the adulterous woman 
stoned according to the custom of the Jews. Sociol- 
ogy and political economy lay quite beyond the range 
of his purposes. He was only concerned about the 
establishment of that kingdom whose object is “‘not 
meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and 
joy in the Holy Spirit.” 

And over that realm he was to be Lord, uniting 
in his person the offices of physician, priest, and 
king—a physician to heal all moral diseases, a 
priest to comfort and bless, and a king to protect 
and govern. As such he was to effect man’s redemp- 
tion, procure his pardon, secure his adoption into the 
family of God, provide for him an inheritance, seal 
him with the Holy Spirit of promise, create him unto 
good works, enthrone him in places of authority, 
and build humanity together into a temple for holy 
habitation which should be filled with his own in- 
dwelling presence and with all the fullness of God. 

And having thus projected a kingdom inimical 
to the kingdoms of this world in their customary 
constitution, it was impossible for him to escape 
the force of the customary methods which worldly 
kingdoms employ to secure their establishment, the 
methods of hate and blood. Jesus had to die. But 
when he died he passed from “‘the naturally Jewish 
and Davidie form of his earthly appearance,’ was 
“set free from the form of Jewish nationality and 
the bond of theocratic obligations,” and “agreeably 
to the spirit of holiness that had reigned in hint’ 
during his lifetime was demonstrated to be the Son 
of God by a resurrection from the dead, was restored 


The Coming Kingdom, 109 


to the position as Son of God which he had renounced 
to become the Son of Man, and so was “placed in 
one uniform relation to the whole human race.’’ The 
angel of the resurrection said to the devoted women, 
as they approached the tomb on that Easter morning, 
“Heisrisen.”” Heisrisenindeed! The Christ of hu- 
manity lives! He reigns! 
‘He rules the world with truth and grace, 
And makes the nations prove 
The glories of his righteousness 

And wonders of his love.” 
“He must reign until he hath put all enemies under 
his feet’”’; until human relationships are rightly ad- 
justed; until all wrongs are righted; until all the 
purposes of God are wrought out with reference to 
this world. ‘The last enemy that shall be rendered 
ineffectual is death.” 

But a kingdom also implies a law. What is the 
law of the kingdom? Love is the law of the realm 
over which Jesus rules. Under the old dispensation 
the Ten Commandments were by preéminence styled 
“The Law.” These were ranged in two natural divi- 
sions, <overing the relations of man to God and of 
man to man, making up the sum total of human obli- 
gations. The first four comprised man’s duties to 
God; the last six, man’s duties to man. The first 
group began with the supremacy of God, the Father; 
the second, with man, the father; thus putting the 
Creator first and the procreator second, the one 
the object of universal reverence, the other the 
object of universal honor. 

But somehow the law failed of its purpose. Men 
learned to observe it only in outward circumstance. 


110 Things Fundamental 


Jesus extended the application of law by connecting 
it with a principle of the heart, thus making the 
intention of evil as culpable as the overt act. He 
embodied all moral law in a single utterance, “Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
thy neighbor as thyself.”’ And this was right, for 
basically, essentially, all sin against God is sin 
against man; and, reciprocally, all sin against man 
is sin against God. Paul crowded it all into a single 
word, “love,” which he declared to be “the ful- 
filling of the law.”” This Bengel interprets to mean: 
“Pay every debt; let none remain due to any man, 
save that immortal debt of mutual love which, how- 
ever fully paid, is still forever due.” But even be- 
yond the conception of Bengel lies the conception 
of Paul, who correctly interprets the mind of Christ: 
‘“‘Love finds no delight whatever in evil, but rejoiceth 
in the truth.” Christ said: “If ye keep my com- 
mandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have 
kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his 
love.”’ And over yonder in the Intercessory Prayer 
he prays that they might all be one, even as he and 
the Father are one—a unity that can never come 
except through the reign of love. 

This great germinal law of love is possessed of 
inexhaustible energies. Human life begins in love. 
The fabric that holds the family together is love. 
Love is the basis of all friendship and fellowship. 
Love equalizes human society. Under the name of 
patriotism love flows through the body politic as the 
lifeblood of a nation. Love absolutely never falls 
down in weariness. It moves on forever and hesi- 
tates at no service that will make men better and 


The'Coming Kingdom 111 


happier. Hope, beneficence, reciprocity, charity, 
the forgiving spirit, unselfishness, purity of motive, 
the law of redemption, faith—all these flow out of 
love. The highest conception of God that man has 
ever reached is, “God is love.” 

But this conception of God has led to some fatal 
conclusions in our day. There is a very prevalent 
notion that God is too good to punish, and this 
conception is having its influence upon the govern- 
ments of both Church and State. There is an amaz- 
ing laxness in the enforcement of law and discipline 
in our day. Still men preach, in the face of the out- 
rageous and alarming increase in bloodguiltiness in 
recent years, “‘Coercion is no remedy.” That de- 
pends always upon how it is administered. If ad- 
ministered in hate, it is no remedy; if in love, it isa 
remedy. There are just two phases of political 
freedom, self-government and anarchy. As the 
interest of the whole will often be against the con- 
venience of some, self-government depends for its 
existence upon the self-restraint of the majority. 
The only way to bring the minority into subjection 
is either by an appeal to conscience or to the police- 
man’s club. And the majority that facls to bring the 
minority into subjection sins against ttself, and will 
ultimately be brought under the cold omnipotence of the 
mob, which 1s so easily aroused and so pitiless when 
provoked. 

Let America take warning! Let the stalwart ma- 
jority no longer rest in complacent inactivity, se- 
cure in the conviction that the radicals in our 
country constitute so pitiful a minority that there 
is no danger. There is danger. Less than two per 


112 Things Fundamental 


cent of the population of France believed in the 
methods of the French Revolution, yet this negli- 
gible minority baptized France in blood. A pitiful 
few now control in Russia, but those few are main- 
taining in Russia the worst hell this world ever 
saw. It is a government of force, not of law; of the 
few, not of the many; of ignorance, not of intelli- 
gence; and poverty, disease, and misery unspeakable 
reign. Great classes of the best people are barred 
from any share in government. No person who has — 
an income can vote. No merchant can vote. No 
clergyman can vote. And there are those who would 
institute that caricature on government in America. 
They are few in number, but powerfully organized 
and financed. The only way to prevent their success 
is to organize and educate the conscience of the 
masses. * 

The State or the Nation that will not educate 
its masses, enforce the decrees of its courts, and 
safeguard the rights of its citizens must ultimate- 
ly pay the price of its cowardice and give way to 
some race with iron in its blood. There is a limit 
to which the monopolist of capital, the monopolist 
of labor, and the monopolist of crime cannot be suf- 
fered to go with impunity, for history shows that 
the tyrant always steps in to perform the task from 
which the people’s representatives and judges re- 
coil. 

Love is a dynamic which compels the disintegra- 
tion of evil. Envy, jealousy, hatred, lust, theft, 
adultery, exploitation, inequality, rebellion, war, 
murder cannot forever stand in its presence. These 
love will melt down with her tender ministries or 


The Coming Kingdom 113 


break at last with a rod of iron. Love moves forever 
forward in her mission to mankind. Like the holy 
waters of Ezekiel’s vision her bounties flow in in- 
creasing abundance as the race moves on to its des- 
tiny. She has written into the laws of all nations 
those principles that protect the property, lives, 
and liberties of men. She is scourging from the 
temple of life and driving into dungeons of dark- 
ness the advocates of passion. She will yet deliver 
the earth of its briers and thorns and thistles and 
make it a fit inheritance for the children of God. 
She will put down all rule, all authority and power 
but her own. Before her all institutions of evil 
must fall. War, with its tale of horrors; the in- 
trenched liquor traffic, with its record of infamy; 
heathenism, that hopeless, dead mastodon of hu- 
manity lying helplessly and uselessly upon the map 
of the world—all these must go down before the 
triumphant march of love. Faith catches that 
vision, hope sees the star, and listening love hears 
the rustle of the angel’s wing coming to herald the 
dawn of that glorious day! 

But equally also a kingdom implies a citizen- 
ship. Who are the citizens of the kingdom? This 
has been the battle ground of theologians. Some 
say he is a citizen who has simply been regenerated; 
some, that citizenship is merely membership in the 
visible Church; while for others it is “‘the hidden life 
with God,” whatever that may signify. Enough 
time and energy have been wasted by the denomi- 
nations in pulling one another’s hair over this 
question to have saved a world, had those energies 
been rightly directed. 

8 


114 Things Fundamental 


Let me say that, with all the misconception of 
the doctrines of Christ, with all the vanity and 
fanaticism of the adherents to Christianity, with 
all the bloodshed of Christian by Christian, the 
wonder is that Christianity has made any progress 
at all in the world. And the sooner we learn that 
a house divided against itself cannot stand, that 
the forces which cripple Christianity and impede 
its progress in the world are internal and not ex- 
ternal, the better it will be for us and the race 
to which God hath appointed us to preach the gospel 
of his Son. 

The Master, in his day upon the earth, was con- 
stantly speaking of “the kingdom.” Those great 
parables of “‘the Sower,”’ “the Leaven,” “the Net,” 
“the Mustard Seed,”’ were all polemical and designed 
to drive out of the minds of those foolish Jews the 
idea that Messiah’s kingdom was to be established 
by violence, and to teach them instead that the prog- 
ress of ‘‘the kingdom,” like the course of nature, is 
painfully slow in the world. More than one hundred 
times is the kingdom referred to in the first three, 
or Synoptic, Gospels. But no sooner do we pass from 
the Gospels to the Acts of the Apostles than we find 
those fine phrases, ‘‘the kingdom of heaven” and 
“the kingdom of God,”’ which hung so constantly on 
the lips of the Master, displaced by the apostles 
with the term “‘Church.’”’ What was the reason for 
that? Are “the kingdom of heaven” and “the 
Church” coextensive terms? Is a man who is a 
member of “the Church” also a citizen of “the 
kingdom’’? And is every man who is not a member 
of “the Church” also not a citizen of “the kingdom’’? 


The Coming Kingdom 115 


If they are not coextensive terms, did Christ au- 
thorize the Church at all? And did the apostles 
have any conception whatever of the kingdom? 

No amount of argument can ever get around 
Christ’s declaration to Peter, “Upon this rock I will 
edify my Church,” nor Paul’s statement, ‘‘The 
kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteous- 
ness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.”’ Jesus 
is forever on the side of the Church, and Paul is 
fully cognizant of the nature of the kingdom. But 
“the Church” and “the kingdom” were not then 
coextensive. They are not coextensive to-day. 
But it is contemplated that they shall be. “Not 
every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall 
enter into the kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus. 
Not every one who is baptized or who assumes 
the obligations of the Church is or will be saved. 
Simon the sorcerer, though baptized and received 
into the Church, could not escape the penetrating 
eye of Peter, who perceived that he was yet “in 
the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” 

If ‘the Church” is not coextensive with “the 
kingdom,”’ by whose authority was it constituted? 
And what was the purpose of it? It was constituted 
by Christ. He gave no specific directions as to polity, 
and those who search for them search 1n vain. There 
is no denomination in the world to-day whose polity 
conforms to the polity of the so-called “ Apostolic 
Church.” The question of polity was left to the op- 
tion of those who were to compose the organization 
in different ages of the world. At any rate mankind 
has always acted on this principle. That fact should 
always be kept in view. The Church was designed as 


116 Things Fundamental 


a means to an end, and not as an end within itself. 
Whenever any Church is prostituted to an end, it 
misses its purpose. It may succeed in keeping its 
people in ignorance and hold sway for a time, but 
ultimately it will be stripped of its power. The 
ambition to build up the Church is holy, if it is 
thereby designed to make it a more efficient means 
of bringing men into the kingdom of God. But when 
it is designed to make it a means for political ad- 
vantage, or for social prestige, or as a club to beat © 
other denominations’ ecclesiastical brains out, or 
as an engine of death, it then becomes an aly of 
unrighteousness. 

The Church was established for man, and only 
as it meets human needs and copes with the problems 
that confront the human race is it a Church at all. 
The only reason it was ever organized was because 
humanity en masse was not fit for the kingdom of 
God. The general run of men had no conception of 
it. Even Nicodemus, ‘‘a ruler of the Jews,” with 
centuries of church life and history behind him, had 
no adequate idea of it. The disciples, up to the 
moment of Christ’s ascension, did not grasp it at all. 
“When they were therefore come together, they 
asked of him, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore 
the kingdom to Israel?” What “‘kingdom’”? Why, 
the old political church-state of the Jews. Even 
after the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost they had 
no idea of separating from Judaism. And had it 
not been for special revelations to Peter, the re- 
markable conversion of Saul, the outpouring of 
the Spirit upon the family of the Gentile Cornelius, 


The Coming Kingdom 117 


and the bitter persecutions of official Jewry, Chris- 
tianity would have died in its cradle. 

The idea of the kingdom was therefore suspended 
while the leaven of the gospel was working through 
the Church to the leavening of the whole lump of 
mankind. In the mind of Christ the kingdom existed 
as an ideal before the Church was constituted. The 
Church is an agency; the kingdom is the end. The 
Church is temporary. It began with time and will 
end with time. The kingdom is everlasting. The 
Holy City, the New Jerusalem, which John in apoc- 
alyptic vision saw coming down from God out of 
heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her hus- 
band, was but a glimpse of the kingdom of God on 
its way to perfect realization among men. There 
will be no need for the Church when the kingdom is 
fully come. 

The kingdom, then, is primarily individualistic. 
“The kingdom of God is within you.” No man 
enters the kingdom until the kingdom first enters 
him. They are citizens of the kingdom who acknowl- 
edge Christ as their King and are controlled by the law 
of the kingdom, which 7s love. 

This is the constitution of the kingdom for whose 
coming Jesus taught his disciples to pray. Why 
not let that kingdom come? Where can one find a 
commonwealth that can care for its subjects in all 
that concerns their essential well-being? ‘‘Common- 
wealth’? means the common weal, the common 
welfare, the common good. But from a misconcep- 
tion of the term “wealth” we are often misled into 
seeking blessings in material accumulations. These 
fancied “blessings” more often turn out to be 


118 Things Fundamental 


“curses.”” Sometimes civilization seems to make. 
great advances, then suddenly to recoil. -The 
reason is, those ‘‘advances’’ were accompanied by 
moral degeneracy. ‘“‘The love of money is the root 
of all evil.” The World War began as a war of 
commercialism, and greed is still at the root of 
all that trouble. ‘‘Blessedness”’ is essentially spir- 
itual. It consists in character, not in condition. 
Such wealth lies quite beyond the power of any 
earthly government to bestow. 

But here is a kingdom pledged to the well-being 
of its citizens, and the Church which Jesus founded 
has as its task the bringing in of its universal do- 
minion. : 

Will it ever come? It has been coming, is com- 
ing, and will come until the divine incarnation is 
complete. The tendency of the human -race is to 
unity of thought and life and action. Even in the 
face of the world’s present disturbed condition the 
believer is undaunted, and the eye of faith sees the 
hand of God leading and unifying mankind. Under 
the impetus of Christianity mankind is rousing from 
the lethargy of ages and coming forth as a strong man 
to run a race. Old systems, with all their direful 
train of abuses, effete ideas and priestcraft, are 
tottering to their fall, and upon their ruins will 
arise governments more in accord with the principles 
of truth and justice. The old notion that by divine 
right one rules and enjoys social prestige above his 
fellows is yielding to the universal truth that in. 
the kingdom of God every man is a peer. Be man’s 
condition what it may, the world has come to recog-= 
nize that he is something more than a biological 


The Coming Kingdom 119 


specimen, to be inspected by the psychologist, dis- 
sected by the anatomist, and plundered by the un- 
merciful hand of monopolistic greed. God’s king- 
dom is surely coming. The fatalistic optimism of 
human selfishness must be supplanted by that op- 
timism which springs from a faith in the triumphs of 
what is right and honest and just and true. Im- 
perialism, that kind which leads one nation to the 
bloody conquest of another, must yield to inter- 
national comity; exploitation, to codperation; and 
the barbarism of aggressive war, to the civilizing 
influences of world-wide peace! 

O if the coming centuries immediately before 
us could unroll their wondrous secrets, we would 
fully realize that that kingdom which ‘‘cometh with- 
out observation,” which is the kingdom of God, is 
the only real kingdom, and even now we would share 
in the transports of joy welling up in the hearts of 
those who descry the future, “How beautiful upon 
the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good 
tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good 
tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that 
saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!”’ 

Only the eternal energies of God can make pos- 
sible the realization of such a hope as this. That 
those energies may be vouchsafed unto us, let us now 
and evermore devoutly pray, “‘Thy kingdom come.” 


CHAPTER VII 
SIN AND DEATH 


As one looks out upon the world around him a 
somewhat forbidding aspect greets his view. The 
curse of barrenness is upon the desert, the fury of the 
elements upon the forest, the beasts of the field 
prey upon and devour one another, the drought of 
summer makes havoc alike of plant and animal, the — 
boreal blasts add their toll, the nations of earth 
still ply their trade of war, in whose wake follow 
swiftly the feet of want and woe, and the stamp of 
misery and death is written over all. What does it 
mean? Science calls it the remains of a primitive 
imperfection which, by the processes of evolution, 
will be shed, much after the same fashion as a 
snake sheds its skin; the Bible asserts that it is 
the result of a curse put upon the earth for man’s 
sake, on account of man’s sin, which can be removed 
through the processes of human redemption. 

Hamartiology, or that part of theology which 
treats of sin, coincides with the Bible view. All 
the creeds of consequence in Christendom are agreed 
upon this point. 

Now death, as employed in Scripture and accepted 
by the Creeds, has a threefold significance: 

1. Physical death, or the separation of the soul 
from the body, in consequence of which the body 
is given over to dissolution. 

a Spiritual death, or the separation of the sod 
from God, in consequence of which the soul becomes 
corrupt in its lusts. 


(120) 


Sin and Death 121 


3. Eternal death, or the everlasting separation 
of soul and body from God, in consequence of which 
they become a prey to the worm which dieth not, 
which is the second death. 

The Scriptures teach that death in its every form 
is a result of sin, and this is the only reasonable ex- 
planation that can be made of death. 

Whether the teachings of geology with reference 
to the reign of death over creation in the epochs an- 
terior to man are true or false, I cannot here take 
space to discuss; but even if they are true, that 
fact does not and cannot nullify the Biblical teach- 
ing that the entrance of physical death into the 
world, so far as man is concerned, was occasioned 
by sin. Although man’s body was of animal organ- 
ization and possessed the natural possibility of 
death, still it was not for that reason bound to die— 
no more than that, because I have in me the pos- 
sibility of crime, I must perforce become a criminal. 
Had man remained obedient to God, and thereby 
united to him, he no doubt would have been trans- 
formed, even as Enoch and Elijah were transformed 
and Christ was on the verge of transformation at 
his transfiguration. If this be not true, pray, what 
explanation will one make of the tree of life? And 
what is one to infer from St. Paul’s expression, “the 
redemption of our body’? Now, “‘redeem” means 
to buy back. But buy back from what? Evidently 
its present state of weakness, sinfulness, decay, and 
death. But to what? The wmmunity from death it 
enjoyed before the fall. No other explanation is 
even decently possible. The whole program of the 
resurrection was launched upon that basis. This 


122 Things Fundamental 


privilege which God intended should be extended to © 
holy men was withdrawn from guilty men and the 
consequence of the withdrawal announced, “Dust 
thou art [and, as such, canst die], and unto dust thou 
shalt return [or, in fact, shalt die].”’ 

- Those who dismiss with a sneer the Biblical 
teaching that “sin brought death into the world, 
with all our woe,’’ are either sold under bondage to 
the evolutionary theory, or have failed to profit from 
Pope’s caution, 


‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” 


Though one, by means of “‘the documentary theory,” 
be able to dispose of Moses, he should still have a 
care how he dissents from Paul on a question of 
Biblical teaching. 

Whether, then, we accept as fact or dismiss as 
fiction the story of Adam and his apple, we are ar- 
rived at the truth that physical death was introduced 
into the world of mankind by the sin of one man. 
And this first sinner, whoever he was, not only sinned 
and died himself, but also laid all of human life 
open to sin and death. When once sin had crossed 
the threshold it possessed the immediate advantage 
of being able to strike at all who were in the house, 
and the universal testimony is that it did not hesi- 
tate to strike. Changing the figure, Adam in his 
sin merely pierced the dike and made entrance for 
the flood that poured through and engulfed hu- 
manity. Had God immediately enforced the penalty . 
and struck him dead upon the spot, would not the 
whole race have perished with him? How much less, 
then, did the race, seminally contained in him and 


Sin and Death 123 


seized with the tendency if not the spirit of revolt to 
which he adhered in that hour, become a dying race? 
Verily, we are born dying, and with a strong in- 
clination to evil. As the matter stands in our 
seventh Article of Religion: 

Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the 
Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the 
nature of man, that naturally is engendered of Adam, whereby 
man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his 
own nature inclined to evil, and that continually. 


The strong tendency of man to crime cannot be de- 
nied. All history is chiefly a record of human guilt. 
Penal statutes, wherever found, were framed solely 
for the purpose of restraining this tendency in man. 
Even death itself appears here as the visible proof 
that.we all like sheep have gone astray and as sin- 
ners are under the invisible judgment of God. 

But where does the responsibility for all this 
rest? There are those who are ready enough to grant 
that man is a sinner, but who still assert that his re- 
sponsibility is only secondary. They contend that 
man could not have sinned if God had not made him 
capable of sinning, and that therefore the primary 
responsibility belongs to God. That God made man 
capable of sinning is true, but that fact no more 
makes God responsible for man’s sin than I am re- 
sponsible for the sin of my son from the mere fact 
that I am his father. God is not an abstraction, as 
the philosophers make him, but a person, as the 
Scriptures teach. Impossibilities exist for God as 
well as for man. Even God cannot make a circle 
square, nor a part equal to the whole. No more could 
he make a machine a man, nor mana machine. God, 


124 Things Fundamental 


as a free agent, made man and divided sovereignty 
with him. Hence, man is free. That which dis- 
tinguishes him as man is the fact that he is the 
creature of uplifted countenance, with eyes that 
look up. This indicates that he alone of all the 
creatures God put upon the earth was not to be 
governed by instinct, but by that to which his 
countenance is lifted—namely, a law designed to 
govern him who in turn was designed to govern all the 
world besides. 

Before man ever existed this law was possible; 
and as soon as he existed the law was in effect, 
antecedent to knowledge, independent of experience. 
Without an immediate revelation from God of the 
existence of this law, experience alone must have 
furnished to man the occasion of its discernment; 
for ina state of nature man’s thought would not first 
have been of a speculative character, but of the 
preservation of his being in the world of nature. 
Moral knowledge he could not have had until expe- 
rience had furnished the data out of which to con- 
struct a law. Revealed, the fact of law became a 
matter of knowledge to begin with, and conscience, 
as a function of the heart, discerned and confirmed 
it. By means of this “power of sight,” this con- 
science, came “‘the consciousness of obligation to- 
ward God,” without recognition of and submission to 
which one’s manhood fails. 

But, it must be remembered, God gave man two 
natures, the natural and the spiritual. On the spir- 
itual side he is like God; on the natural, like the 
animal. For the government of the spiritual and the 
natural in man God fixed but one law, that law of 


Sin and Death 125 


which I have just spoken, intending that the animal 
nature should always be kept in subjection to the 
spiritual. But there remained the possibility for the 
animal passions, multiform and complex, to break 
away from their subjection, in their clamor for 
gratification, and mark out a path or law for them- 
selves. 

As to whether this should be so or not, man was 
given the power to determine. Though he was 
limited, finite, he had the power of private direction. 
In other words, he was free. That means nothing 
more nor less than that God made man capable of 
disobedience. Had he made him otherwise, obedi- 
ence would have been impossible. If wickedness 
could not have been, righteousness could not have 
been. This does not imply that man had to know and 
do evil in order to know and do good; it means that, 
had there been no ability for him to do evil, there 
likewise would have been no ability for him to do 
good. Where there is no alternative for the will its 
choice has neither merit nor demerit. And this 
power to choose was not something superadded to 
man’s being; it was a law of his being—he had to 
choose. And the choice he made was to determine 
his fate, whether he should be godlike or brutelike. 
He was made the architect of his own spiritual 
fortune. The cringing puppyism that persists in 
disobedience and whines at responsibility may be 
well enough for a dog, but it is hardly worthy of a 
man. 

In Romans vii. 23 the apostle Paul gives a graph- 
ic picture of the struggle between conscience and 
passion. After expressing his delight in the law of 


126 Things Fundamental 


God as found in conscience, he says: “‘ But I see an-~ 
other [different] law in my members, warring against 
the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity 
to the law of sin which is in my members.”’ Here the 
word “law,” which he asserts exists in his members, 
cannot mean law in the ordinary sense. God is the 
author of all law, and I am perfectly sure he never 
made any ‘“‘law of sin.” If such a “law” exists, it 
was produced by the passions and impulses of the 
natural man in their struggle for supremacy over the 
spiritual, and can therefore be nothing more than an 
inward principle of action which operates with the 
regularity and seems to have the force of law. So 
considered, we have then two laws, the one “the law 
of the mind” and the other “the law of sin and 
death.” 

Now the conflict which “the law of sin’ wages 
against ‘“‘the law of the mind” is precisely what con- 
stitutes temptation. This “temptation” is not neces- 
sarily to our hurt, but may be to our profit. The 
apostle James would have us “‘rejoice”’ at it: “My 
brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers 
temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your 
faith worketh patience.’”?’ And the same writer as- 
sures us that the man is “blessed”? who endures 
temptation. 

Who, or what, then, is responsible for this “con- 
flict”? Is God? So some believe, and so some 
seem to have believed in the apostle’s day, for we 
find James saying (and certainly in answer to some 
argument), “God cannot be tempted with evil, 
neither tempteth he any man.” Who, then, tempts 
man? The devil is the father of temptation. But 


Sin and Death 127 


how does this articulate with that other saying of 
James, ‘“‘But every man is tempted, when he is 
drawn away of his own lust, and enticed”? The 
picture and figure are drawn from hunting and fish- 
ing, and suggest craftiness. The hunter or fisherman 
is the agent who displays the bait, intended to appeal 
to the lust of bird or fish and lure it from its retreat 
to captivity. But the “captivity” is not due to the 
craftiness of the agent, nor to the bazt, but to the lust 
of the captive. Had there been no “lust,’’or had 
that lust been mastered, there would have been 
no captivity. 

So the “of’’ of the passage expresses the source 
and not the agent of sin. The devil is the agent of 
sin; the lusts of man, the source of sin. The devil 
piaces the bait which excites, inflames, moves the 
passions of man; but the devil’s bait does no harm, 
until man’s own lusts have prevailed upon him to ap- 
propriate that bait and make it his own. Man has 
the final say as to whether any incitement to evil 
shall issue in sin or not. Temptation is not sin. 
“Yielding is sin.” So, literally, a man is “tried by 
his own [peculiar] lusts.”” By them he is drawn away 
from ‘‘the law of the mind” and “enticed” to 
yield to ‘‘the law of sin in his members.” Hence, 
sin has no place in objective existence and outside the 
will of man. 

The apostle uses a very strong word to show the 
violence of this “conflict”; epithumia, from epi, 
“upon,” and thumos, “passion,” in turn derived 
from thuo, which means to rush on unchecked, as 
the wind; to move with violence, as a swollen river; 
to rage with the fury of battle, as, in the Odyssey, 


128 Things Fundamental 


“the ground boiled with blood’’: hence, unchecked, 
uncurbed, unrestrained passion, sensual desire, lust. 
Precisely the same word is used by the Master in 
Matthew v. 28, “Whosoever looketh upon a woman 
to lust [epithumesai] after her hath committed 
adultery,” etc. When this burning passion, this 
sensual desire, lust, had taken one captive (not “‘con- 
ceived,’ as the King James has it), literally captured 
him (sullabousa, Aorist, denoting completed action) 
and holds him at its mercy, then sin results. Reason | 
has abdicated to passion. There is one reason; 
there are many passions; and the man who is under 
the control of the passions is, like a wave of the sea, 
driven and tossed, subject to whatever passion 
happens to be master at the time. He has literally 
gone to pieces, fallen to staves, like a dry barrel. The 
reign of sensualism is on. He has been brought 
‘into captivity to the law of sin.” He is spiritually 
dead. 

From this it will be seen that no man can com- 
mit sin until he allows his countenance to fall, 
surrenders his manhood (I use the term in its original 
sense of courage), gives up the mastery over his 
passions, loses faith in God, and hands his cre- 
dentials to the devil. In proof of this position I 
cite two instances, Adam and Cain, though their 
number might be greatly multiplied. 

“And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said 
unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy 
voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was 
naked [gumnos, so the Greek; “‘ defenseless, unarmed,” 
so the word]; and I hid myself.”” Now manhood 
is courage. That “courage”? Adam, through dis- 


Sin and Death 129 


obedience, had lost. He was therefore unarmed, 
without defense before God, and being so was 
afraid. ‘“‘And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art 
thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?’’ 
Back in the preceding verse we find the answer. 
Cain was jealous of and angry at his brother. He 
was a sinner, and in the process of becoming one he 
allowed his eyes to fall from the law of God to the 
lusts of his flesh. He surrendered his manhood and 
became a coward. Thus the consciousness of sin 
(not ‘‘conscience,”’? as Shakespeare has it) “‘makes 
cowards of us all.”’ 

That surrender of manhood the apostle denomi- 
nates hamartia, “‘sin,’’ a violation of the divine law 
in thought or in act. It is also defined as “‘a miss- 
ing the mark.”’ The “‘mark”’ which sin causes one to 
““miss”’ is the realization of perfect manhood in Christ 
Jesus, which Paul characterizes as “the high calling 
of God,’”’ and which God has set to distinguish the 
end of a race where that manhood as a “prize”’ by 
human beings may be won. 

Ah, Christ was Master, master over passion, 
master over ‘‘the law of sin and death,’”’ master over 
the prince of the powers of hell, master over the 
grave! He was never unarmed, never defenseless, 
never afraid! And God would have every one of his 
children to be like him. What a prize! 

Anything whatsoever that hinders one in the 
race for that prize is sin. Anything that makes one 
miss that mark is sin. Sin blunts the sensibilities, 
weakens the will, clouds the intellect, deadens the 
conscience, gives mastery to the appetites, enfeebles 
the body, and makes one more and more incapable 

9 


130 Things Fundamental 


of winning the race of life and. regaining the lost 
prize of manhood. Hence, Paul exhorts us to lay 
aside every weight and ‘‘the sin which doth so easily 
beset us,’”’ that we may “run with patience the race 
that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the beginner 
and finisher of our faith.” 

But suppose one refuses to heed this earnest 
exhortation of the apostle: what then? Thayer says: - 
“‘ Hamartia never denotes vitiosity.’”’ No, but it may 
lead to that, just as temptation may lead to sin. 
Sin is progressive in its character. Like leprosy, 
it attacks the extremities first, then as a principle 
of life gradually eats its way on in to the vitals, 
when the destruction of spiritual affections and 
moral manhood becomes complete. The sinner is 
then wholly and unalterably depraved, with all 
sense of religious feeling and principle gone and no 
power to call them back. Like guilty Cain, he has 
entered the land of perpetual unrest (Nod), from 
which there is no return. This is synonymous with 
thanatos, ‘‘death,’’ in Seripture, which means ever- 
lasting separation from God and all holiness. Of course 
actual assessment of the penalty cannot be made 
until the general judgment, but there is absolutely no 
warrant in Scripture for the belief that one must die 
physically before that stage in sin has actually been 
reached. This is a horrible thought, but one must 
face it in anything like an exhaustive treatise of 
sin. 


** While the light holds out to burn, 
The vilest sinner may return,” 


may be true of all sinners in this life except those 
who have sinned away their day of grace. Who is 


Sin and Death Lab 


there that has not seen men damned before they 
were dead? This is the philosophy of Christ’s teach- 
ing with reference to the man who builds his house 
upon the sand: “And every one that heareth these 
sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be 
likened unto a foolish man, which built his house 
upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the 
floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that 
house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” 

If this teaching were not temporal, and my in- 
terpretation seem strained, we have yet the direct 
statement of Jesus: “All manner of sin and blas- 
phemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphe- 
my against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto 
men.’ This is certainly temporal, for the forgive- 
ness of sin takes place in time, not in eternity. The 
story of the Rich Man and Lazarus certainly teaches 
that in the other world there is “a great gulf fixed,” 
which faith cannot bridge, nor the love of God span 
if it would! 

In view of this possibility, let him in whom all 
hope is not yet dead earnestly cry: 

‘Jesus, let thy pitying eye 
Call back a wandering sheep; 
False to thee, like Peter, I 
Would fain, like Peter, weep. 
Let me be by grace restored; 
On me be all long-suffering shown; 


Turn, and look upon me, Lord, 
And break my heart of stone.’’ 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE CONQUEST OF SIN 


It would be too dark and forbidding to leave 
man at the point where we found him at the close of 
Chapter VII. No treatise on sin can be anything like 
satisfactory which does not give consideration to 
the conquest of sin. Either God must find a way 
through man to conquer sin, or sin through man will 
find a way to conquer God. While God could not 
invade man’s premises, uncreate his own creature 
and refuse to allow him to act and learn by action, 
it was wholly within his province to interpose in his 
behalf and provide a way out of the trouble into 
which misguided man had fallen. 

The first step in the solution of the problem was 
“The Covenant of Blood” into which Jesus 2ntered 
with the human race. 

H. Clay Trumbull, in his “‘The Blood Covenant’”’ 
(Third Edition, pages 4, 5), says: 

One of these primitive rites, which is deserving of more 
attention than it has yet received, as throwing light on many 
important passages of the Bible teaching, is the rite of blood- 
covering, by which two persons enter into the closest, the 
most enduring, and the most sacred of compacts, as friends 
and brothers, through the inter-commingling of their blood, 
by means of mutual tasting, or of its inter-transfusion. 


He thus describes a present-day instance of it, 
which took place ‘in a village at the base of the 
mountains of Lebanon,” as given to him by a native 
Syrian: 

(132) 


The Conquest of Sin 133 


It was two young men who were to enter into this covenant. 
They had known each other and had been intimate for years; 
but now they were to become brother-friends in the covenant 
of blood. Their relatives and neighbors were called together, 
in the open place before the village fountain, to witness the 
sealing compact. The young men publicly announced their 
purpose and their reasons for it. Their declarations were 
written down in duplicate—one paper for each friend—and 
signed by themselves and several witnesses. One of the 
friends took a sharp lancet and opened a vein in the other’s 
arm. Intothe opening thus made he inserted a quill, through 
which he sucked the living blood. The lancet-blade was 
carefully wiped on one of the duplicate covenant-papers; 
then it was taken by the other friend, who made a like in- 
cision in the first user’s arm and drank his blood through the 
quill, wiping the blade on the duplicate covenant-record. 
The two friends declared together: ‘‘We are brothers in a 
covenant made before God: who deceiveth the other, him 
will God deceive.’”’ Each blood-marked covenant-record was 
then folded carefully, to be sewed up in a small leathern case, 
or amulet, about an inch square; to be worn thenceforward 
by one of the covenant-brothers, suspended about the neck 
or bound upon the arm, in token of the indissoluble relation. 


In view of this Oriental custom, he says that 
there is more than coincidence in the fact 


that the Arabic words for friendship, for affection, for blood, 
and for leech, or blood-sucker, are but variations from a 
common root. Alaga means ‘‘to love,” to adhere,” ‘‘to 
feed.” Alag, in the singular, means “love,” ‘‘friendship,’’ 
“‘attachment,” “blood.”’ As the plural of alaga, alaqg means 
“leeches,” or ‘‘blood-suckers.’’ The truest friend clings like a 
leech, and draws blood in order to the sharing thereby of his 
friend’s life and nature. 


This eminent investigator has found many vari- 
ations of this primitive rite among the tribes of 
Africa. David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley 


134 Things Fundamental 


give descriptions of it, and in one way and another — 
Stanley is said to have entered into blood-covenant 
with all the leading families of equatorial Africa. 
Similarly also he points out traces of the same 
primitive rite in the folklore of the Norseland peoples 
of Europe. When Odin, ‘‘the beneficent god of 
light and knowledge,” failed to invite Loké to a 
certain ‘‘banquet of the gods,’’ Loké found entrance, 
reproached his brother Odin, and thenceforth be- 
came the god of discord. The incident is commemo- 
rated in Scandinavian song: 


‘Father of Slaughter, Odin, say, 
Rememberest not the former day 
When, ruddy in the goblet stood, 
For mutual drink, our blended blood? | 
Rememberest not, thou then didst swear, 
The festive banquet ne’er to share, 
Unless thy brother Lok was there?” 


Instances of it are found in China; in parts of 
Borneo; among the aborigines of North and South 
America; and the peoples of the Society Islands. 
He turns the light of the classics upon the custom, 
and quotes from Tacitus and Lucian to show “this 
rite of blood-brotherhood as practiced in the East.” 
He quotes from Sallust, to show Catiline’s use of 
it in his “‘Conspiracy.’’ In the Egyptian Book of the 
Dead, which was nothing but a sort of funeral ritual, 
he finds “‘several obvious references” to the practice 
of blood-covenanting in the Eleventh Dynasty, faz 
back of the days of Abraham. Indeed, he asserts’ 
that ‘“‘there are historic traces of it, from time im- 
memorial, in every quarter of the globe.” He 
further says: 


The Conquest of Sin 135 


And so this close and sacred covenant relation, this rite of 
blood-friendship, this inter-oneness of life by an inter-oneness 
of blood, shows itself in the primitive East, and in the wild and 
prehistoric West; in the frozen North, as in the torrid South. 
Its traces are everywhere. It is of old, and it is of to-day; as 
universal and as full of meaning as life itself. 

Tt is interesting to note the practices of man 
that have grown out of this custom. It has been an 
age-long practice to use the armlet, the bracelet, 
the necklace, and the ring as symbols of a bond of 
union between the giver and the receiver. Mr. 
Trumbull gives it as his belief that these customs 
_are a direct consequence of the practice of binding the 
covenant upon the arm, or hanging it about the 
neck, of the participants. At the coronation of the 
Sovereign of Great Britain, even at the present day, 
the Archbishop of Canterbury places “The Wedding 
Ring of England’”’ upon the fourth finger of the 
king’s right hand, in token of the covenant between 
the sovereign and his people. I would add to these 
the custom of lifting the hand in taking an oath 
before the Court. It is an offering of the blood to 
God, in-token of fidelity to the truth. 

The idea underlying all this is that the blood 
is the life of man. Not only is it his life, but it 
has a vivifying power when transfused from a vigor- 
ous and healthy man into the veins of one sick and 
depleted. Transfusion of blood has come to be a 
practice in modern surgery. It is even asserted that 
it was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, the 
Hebrews, and the Syrians, but it is not known with 
what success. If they knew the art, the secret was 
lost. At this day the king of the Zulus, in South 
Africa, when sick has a portion of the blood taken 


136 Things Fundamental. 


from his attendants and introduced into his circu- 
lation. Eminent medical authorities assert that 
health itself can be transfused with the blood of a 
healthy man. The inflowing life drives out disease 
and death. Thus blood-giving is life-giving. — 

Not only does there seem to have been a uni- 
versal idea that the transfusion of blood imparts 
life to the receiver, but also that which is the most 
desirable in the nature of him from whom the blood 
is received. The savage custom of drinking the 
blood and eating the heart of enemies killed in bat- 
tle was founded on the idea that the bravery of the 
deceased passed on with the blood to the victor. In 
an article I saw recently contributed to the New 
York World it is asserted that Mr. Frederick O’Brien, 
the distinguished American traveler and author, who 
recently spent a year in the Polynesian group of 
islands in the South Seas, puts in the mouth of 
Kahauiti, a cannibal chief, these words: “I killed 
Tufetu ..°'..and’ ate the “right “arm: s25 enbee 
had wielded the war club. That gives a man the 
strength of his enemy.” 

Nor is that all. Blood has been universally 
held as a means of inspiration, because blood, which 
is life, has been accounted as belonging to him who 
is the author of life. The giving up of blood to him 
was the giving up of life to him, and the surrender- 
ing of life to him was but the entering into com- 
munion with him. Mr. Trumbull says at this point: 


Whatever has been man’s view of sin and its punishment, 
and his separation from God because of unforgiven sin (L 
speak now of man as he is found, iwithout the specific teach- 
ings of the Bible on this subject), he has counted blood —his 


The Conquest of Sin 137 


own, blood, in actuality or by substitute—a means of inter- 
union with God, or with the gods.! 

In process of time there came to be other va- 
riations of the custom, ultimately the practice of 
pledging in the wine cup and the substitution of 
the blood of the animal for the blood of the man, 
which substitute blood was offered vicariously and 
sprinkled upon the altar of sacrifice. 

There can be no doubt that all these are “‘per- 
verted vestiges’’ and unconscious prophecies brought 
down from the primal religion, pointing to the Cross 
of Calvary and the Brotherhood that should come as 
a consequence of that sacrifice. To some the Chris- 
tian Brotherhood will appear as the culmination of a 
gradual evolution of the idea from a barbarous be- 
ginning; but to me all these things point to a com- 
mon origin in the early Asiatic home of the scattered 
peoples of the world, and to a common theme, The 
Redemption of the Race through the Blood of Christ. 

Herbert Spencer thus accounts for the idea of 
A Universal Invisible Agency: 

From dreams arises the idea of a wandering double; whence 
follows the belief that the double, departing permanently at 
death, is then a ghost. Ghosts thus become assignable 
causes for strange occurrences. The greater ghosts are 
presently supposed to have extended spheres of action. As 
men grow intelligent, the conception of these minor invisible 
agencies merges into the conception of a universal invisible 


agency; and there result hypotheses concerning the origin, 
not of special incidents only, but of things in general.? 


But that men intuitively know God, or reach the 


1 The Blood Covenant,” page 148. 
2*First Principles,’ page 24. 


138 Things Fundamental 


idea of him by a naturalistic process, first in a 
crude, barbarous way, then after an enlightened 
fashion as evolution carries them on, is an assumption 
of science which has been proved utterly unscien- 
tific. Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, who introduced 
into this country the system of deaf-mute instruction, 
tested those brought under his care on the point of 
“spiritual conceptions,” and his testimony was that 
he never found a person who, prior to specific in- 
struction, had any idea whatever of the existence and 
nature of God. If primitive man, according to 
Spencer, evolved the idea of ‘‘a universal invisible | 
agency’? by means of dreams, why have no deaf- 
mutes been found who have evolved the same idea 
by the same process? 

Thus the necessity for an external revelation is 
seen. How that original revelation was corrupted, 
distorted, and twisted, sometimes almost out of 
recognition, is accounted for in the “Encyclopedia 
of Freemasonry” by Albert G. Mackey in the topic 
“Dispersion of Mankind”’ as follows: 

The knowledge of the great truths of God and immortality 
were known to Noah, and by him communicated to his 
descendants, the Noachide or Noachites, by whom the true 
worship continued to be cultivated for some time after the 
subsidence of the deluge; but when the human race was dis- 
persed, a portion lost sight of the divine truths which had 
been communicated to them from their common ancestor, 
and fell into the most grievous theological errors, corrupting 
the purity of the worship and the orthodoxy of the religious 
faith which they had primarily received. These truths were 
preserved in their integrity by but a very few in the patriar- 
chal line, while still fewer were enabled to retain only dim 
and glimmering portions of the true light. 


In view of all this, how full of meaning is that 


The Conquest of Sin 139 


act of Jesus when, at the Feast of the Passover, on 
the point of realizing or fulfilling the original promise 
of Genesis iii. 15, he took the cup and blessed it, 
and gave it to his disciples, saying, “All ye drink 
of this, for this is my blood of the new testament 
[covenant], which is shed for many for the remis- 
sion of sins” (Matt. xxvi. 27, 28). By that symbolic 
act he received them into the covenant of blood. 
Thenceforth they were to be bound to him by the 
strongest ties conceivable. “If ye ask anything 
in my name, I will do it” (John xiv. 14). ‘‘Greater 
Jove hath no man than this, that a man lay down 
his life for his friends’ (John xv. 18). ‘‘Hence- 
forth I call you not servants [slaves]: . . . but 
I have called you friends {intimate companions]’’ 
(John xv. 15). Away back yonder in the synagogue 
at Capernaum he had said: “Except ye eat the 
flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have 
no life in you” (John vi. 53). Even beyond that 
he had said: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent 
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be 
lifted up: that whosoever believeth on him might 
not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John iii. 
14). 

The death of Jesus, then, was not an accident; 
it came by the determinate purpose of God. It was 
not an incident; it was a moral necessity. Jesus 
said “‘must,” using that form of the verb which is 
suggestive of moral obligation, “denoting especially 
that constraint which arises from divine appoint- 
ment.” It is an unavoidable, urgent, compulsory 
must. 

But why was it necessary for Jesus to die? I 


140 Things Fundamental 


am willing to concede that Jesus in the passage 
immediately cited above more probably alludes to 
“‘the heavenly exaltation which he was to attain by 
the crucifixion” rather than to the crucifixion itself, 
as a careful comparison with John viii. 28 and xii. 32 
may reveal; yet the process of “exaltation” in- 
cludes the cross as the only means to the attainment 
of that end. Between the humiliation and exaltation 
the cross was imperative. Just as, in the same 
manner, after the same fashion as, Moses lifted up 
the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of 
God had to be lifted up. 

Was the necessity for his death found in the fact 
that he was human and had therefore to die, just as 
other human beings died? Did the incarnation, 
under the actual circumstances of humanity, carry 
with it the necessity of the passion? Did the fact, 
“Dust thou art,’’ in his case carry with it the curse, 
“and to dust thou shalt return’? ‘“‘He knew no 
sin,’ and it could not therefore be that he must die 
on that account. Does it not occur as a most singu- 
lar thing that we are nowhere told in the Scriptures 
that Jesus was ever sick? And what significance 
has it that Jesus put forth his hand and touched the 
leper who came and worshiped him, towched one 
afflicted with an infectious and incurable disease, 
touched him from whom people and kindred shrank 
in horror, if it be not true that Jesus was not liable 
to infection and disease as other men were? To me 
it is unthinkable that Jesus could have died in the 
natural and ordinary way, just as it is unthink- 
able that Adam would have died if he had not 
sinned, : The penalty God attached to violated 


The Conquest of Sin 141 


law was death; Jesus was guilty of no violation; 
hence, death was not possible from that quarter. 

Then why was it necessary for Jesus to die? 
Let us come to an immediate answer: It was neces- 
sary vn order to the remission of sins. This, however, 
is not to be understood as an iron decree of God 
which Christ had to obey. There was a race dead in 
sin, that could not be revived except by the trans- 
fusion of new, life-giving blood. To Christ there was 
the choice between allowing the race to die and 
rot in sin, or of bringing health and life to them by 
the giving of his blood, and he chose the latter. 
He gave himself. It was a voluntary sacrifice. 
“Greater love hath no man than this.” 

Here we are met by a cloud of objectors, men in 
the Church as well as out of it. First, there are the 
sponsors for this modern doctrine hnown as “The 
Moral Influence Theory,’’ who hold that ‘“‘the idea 
of an objective atonement was invented in order to 
satisfy the exigencies of rigid theories concerning 
the divine justice,’’ as though the great theologians 
of the Church in ages gone had no knowledge of 
God’s revelation, and had therefore to fill up their 
time by manufacturing “clumsy inventions,” to 
be discovered by the theological jacksnipes of our 
day, who, having nothing else to commend them 
to public notice, resort to spectacular attacks upon 
men “the latchet of whose shoes they are not worthy 
to unloose.”’ 

The death of Christ as the objective ground of the 
atonement is not the creation of dogmatic theology. 
Before dogmatic theology this doctrine was, just 
as the stars were before the science of astronomy, 


142 Things Fundamental 


or the earth was before the science of geology. And 
through more than nineteen centuries the Church 
has held tenaciously on in unbroken succession to 
the belief that God grants pardon to man, not on 
account of Christ’s death strictly speaking, but 
through the giving of his blood. From this as a 
center all Christian dogmatism radiates. But the 
doctrine was stated and accepted as an article of 
faith before the rising intellectual life of the Church 
brought on the age of theory. Therefore if any have 
a quarrel on account of the doctrine, his quarrel 
must be with Christ himself and not with the 
“‘theologians.”’ And our subject of inquiry is not 
whether the death of Jesus, as the ground of our 
forgiveness, comports with human ethics or not, 
but whether the Word of God teaches that we have 
redemption through his blood. 

We have already seen from Mr. Trumbull’s in- 
vestigations that the idea universally held by the 
heathen in making their sacrifices to the gods was 
that of substitution. It must be stated, however, 
that they had no conception of the historico-re- 
demptive use of them. It remains now to be seen 
what that historico-redemptive conception is. Cre- 
mer tells us that “all Old Testament sacrifice, all 
sacrifices connected with the scheme (I do not like 
the word) of grace in the Bible have especial reference 
to sin” (Heb. v. 1). From this and the additional 
fact that all sacrifices were discontinued upon the 
realization of New Textament redemption it is seen 
that Biblical sacrifice bore the character of sub- 
stitution. (See Cremer, page 291.) Christ in his 


The Conquest of Sin 143 


death literally put an end to sin offerings. He 
substituted them. 

The testimony of Jesus supports this view. We 
have already seen how that he, at the Pass- 
over Supper, gave his disciples the cup, saying, 
“This is my blood of the new testament, which 
is shed for many for the remission of sins.” It now 
remains to be seen how the apostles understood it. 
Peter says: “For Christ also once suffered for sins, 
the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to 
‘God.” John says: ‘For God so loved the world, 
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever 
believeth on him should not perish, but have ever- 
lasting life.’ St. Paul says: ‘For God hath not 
appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by 
our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether 
we wake or sleep we should live together with him.” 

In the New Testament there are nineteen passages 
which represent that Christ died for sinners; seven 
that he suffered for sins; three that he bore our sins; 
and two that he was made “sin” and “‘curse”’ for us. 
There are twelve passages which assert that re- 
mission of sin and deliverance from its penal con- 
sequences are due to the death of Jesus. In three 
instances he is our “justification”; in nine our 
“‘redemption’’; in five our “‘reconciliation’’; in four a 
“‘propitiation”’ (or covering) for sin. 

What do the terms “‘ransom,” “redeem,” “propi- 
tiation,” “reconciliation,” ‘‘remission,” ‘‘for,’’ and 
“sacrifice”? mean? The fundamental idea of lutron, 
“ransom,” is the same as that found in Numbers 
xxxv. 31: “Moreover ye shall take no satisfaction 
{nothing as a substitute] for the life of a murderer, 


144 Things Fundamental 


which is guilty of death; but he shall surely be put 
to death.”” The idea is the same in Matthew xx. 28: 
“Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom 
[substitute] for many.” Similarly also Mark x. 45. 
A ransom is the price of expiation, as equivalent for 
punishment due, and frees from the consequences of 
guilt. Hzxagoradzo (redeem), literally, to buy out of 
the agora, or market place, all there is in it to be 
bought; to buy out, and hence to redeem, prisoners. 
Christ, by offering the satisfaction that was due 
(Gal. ili. 18), freed us from our liability, by reason 
of which we are bound to him. Hzlasmos (propitia- 
tion) means reconciliation, expiation, a covering for 
sin. Hilaskomai (to make reconciliation) means to 
make expiation, not with the idea that God is alienat- 
ed from man, and that he requires to be changed. 
The death of Jesus is not to be understood as a bribe 
to God, by which he was won over to disregard what 
justice would have required him to punish. God is 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and an 
expiation (a substitutionary suffering of the punish- 
ment) was necessary that, for righteousness’ sake, he 
might not have to change, or adopt a different 
course of action from which he had always followed; 
and the expiation was such as his own love instituted 
and gave; and he instituted and gave it, because man 
in his sin could neither venture nor find one. (See 
Cremer, page 303.) Avphesis (remission) means the 
setting free of a prisoner, the canceling of debt, the 
forgiveness of sin. Aniz (for) literally means in 
front of. Robertson (‘A Grammar of New Testa- 
ment Greek,” page 573), after giving a very careful 


The Conquest of Sin 145 


explanation of its meaning, says: “These important 
doctrinal passages (Matt. xx. 28 and Mark x. 45) 
teach the substitutionary conception of Christ’s 
death, not because ant: of itself means ‘instead,’ 
which is not true, but because the context renders 
any other resultant idea out of the question.” See 
also anti tow patros (“in the room of his father’’), in 
Matthew ii. 22. Hwuper, “for,’’ literally means over, 
but in 1 Timothy ii. 6 it manifestly carries the idea of 
substitution. The idea cannot be got rid of in 
Galatians iii. 13 without doing violence to the con- 
text, nor in John x. 15, nor in Romans v. 6. 

That Jesus Christ in his suffering and death was 
a substitute for us; that the iniquitres of us all were 
laid on him; and that by his stripes we are healed, 
is, next to the fact of God, the best-authenticated doc- 
trine in Holy Writ. 

That this theory embraces all there is in the 
Atonement I would not be so foolish as to assert. 
No human theory can possibly embrace all. But 
that it embraces more of the truth than any other 
human theory, I will say. For consider that twice 
before the final sacrifice of the cross Jesus gave his 
blood, once in circumcision, by which he entered 
into the covenant with Abraham and pledged his 
blood in fidelity to it, becoming a partaker of it ac- 
cording to the flesh, that all who through faith 
might become his in the ages to come might also be 
heirs of the faithful Abraham. 

But that was not sufficient, and he made yet 
another offering of blood, even “the bloody sweat.” 
After the institution of the Supper he went with 
his disciples across the brook Kidron to the Garden 

10 


146 Things Fundamental 


of Gethsemane, the Place of the Olive Press. There, 
at the entrance to that garden, in the shadow of the 
trees, amidst stillness and darkness, save only the 
weird light of the Passover moon, he cried, “ My soul 
is exceeding sorrowful unto death,” went forward a 
little, fell down on his face, and in the broken lan- 
guage of sorrow poured out his heart in prayer to 
God. For one hour he endured that more than 
mortal agony, shuddering nature contending against 
indomitable will, the violent commotion of the 
nervous system turning the blood out of its natural 
course through every pore, until the “I will” of sub- 
mission burst from his lips and stilled the tempest of 
his soul to a holy calm. No wonder the litany cry of 
the Ages goes up to him, 
‘By thine agonizing pain, 
And bloody sweat, we pray; 
By thy dying love to man, 
Take all our sins away.” 


But neither the offering of blood in circumcision 
nor that of “the bloody sweat’ was sufficient. 
The Covenant of Blood could not be consummated 
without the death of the Covenanter. So Jesus 
passed to the Judgment Seat of the Roman Court. 
There the infuriated mob pressed a crown of thorns 
upon his head, put a frail reed in his hands, and 
mocked him as king. Condemned to die, he went 
out from that Court, bearing his cross to Calvary. 
Here I see a broken reed, sign of broken power. 
There is the place where he fell under the weight of 
his cross. Here are the pits of the blood drops that 
fell from his pierced brow. Yonder is the scene of the 
crucifixion itself, not far from the sacred spot where, 


The Conquest of Sin’ 147 


two thousand years ago, Abraham prepared to 
sacrifice Isaac to God. 

But now there was no arm to intervene. Through 
hands never stretched out except in blessing, through 
feet that never turned aside except on errands of 
mercy, the great nails unfeelingly tore their way. 
It was high noon as the cross was lifted and adjusted. 
The unobscured sun was riding the heavens in me- 
ridian glory. Soon it would be time for offering the 
evening sacrifice. Type and Antitype would be 
slain together. As if to add emphasis to the con- 
tempt they felt for him, they set two crosses beside 
his, that he might utter his dying prayers to the 
accompaniment of the curses of malefactors. 

Just then an officer from Pilate went forward 
and nailed this inscription above his head, ‘This 
is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’”’ A proud Pharisee 
called in derision from the crowd, “If thou be the 
Son of God, come down from the cross.’’ One of the 
thieves said, “If thou be Christ, save thyself and 
us.” The High Priest answered, “‘He saved others; 
himself he cannot save.’”’ The four soldiers that 
crucified him sat down in utter abandon at the foot 
of the cross and gambled for his raiment. Jesus 
said, “I thirst,’ and one of the soldiers ran and 
filled a sponge with gall and vinegar and held it up to 
his mouth, which, when he had tasted, he would not 
drink. As if to exhaust their hatred in one mighty 
effort, the sullen, insulting, mocking, murderous 
mob wagged their heads in derision and cried, ‘Ah, 
thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in 
three days, save thyself, and come down from the 


148 Things Fundamental 


cross.” Jesus prayed, ‘‘Father, forgive them; for 
they know not what they do.” 

Then the heart of God could endure no more. 
He withdrew his presence. “ Hloz, Eloi, lama sabach- 
thani?”’ came the cry of unutterable anguish. The 
sun veiled his face and refused to shine. For three 
full hours gross darkness hung over the whole land. 
The sin of the world from Eden to Judgment settled 
round the Cross of Calvary. Christ took upon him © 
all the sin that ever had been, that was, and that 
ever would be; and as the weight of it pressed down 
in one mighty load upon him, he shouted in triumph, 
“Tt is finished,” and yielded up his spirit to God. 

Then the earth quaked, rocks burst, the moun- 
tains tottered, the veil of the Temple—dread symbol 
of separation between God and guilty man—was 
rent from top to bottom. The mercy seat stood 
open to the gaze of sinners. The way of approach 
was sprinkled with the blood of him “who through 
the Eternal Spirit had offered himself without spot 
to God.” 

The next advance in the solution of the prob- 
lem of sin was the coming of the Holy Spirit. Be- 
fore Jesus went away he promised that the Holy 
Spirit would come, and that he has come can be 
attested by every true child of God on earth. He 
is Christ’s vicar in the world, to plead in Christ’s 
absence the cause of righteousness. He is a person, 
and acts for himself, and testifies of Christ, and 
brings to man’s remembrance all things that have 
been spoken concerning righteousness. He helps 
man’s infirmities, making intercessions for him 
“with groanings which cannot be uttered.” He 


The Conquest of Sin 149 


opens the eye of man’s understanding, illuminates 
his mind, quickens his conscience, and stimulates 
his will. He convicts man of sin, and is therefore the 
originating cause of repentance. He is the active 
agent in the regeneration of man, and afterwards 
witnesses to his adoption into the family of God. 
In trial he sustains; in sorrow, comforts; in healing, 
scatters life through every part and sanctifies the 
whole. He endues man with power for his life’s 
tasks, goes with him to every field of service, and 
gives success to his efforts. In a word, the Holy 
Spirit broods over “‘nature’s night”’ and points the 
feet of humanity to the path that leads up to the 
Uncreated Light. 

Finally, there is the Ministry of the Word. Be- 
fore Jesus ascended to the Father he put in the 
hands of his disciples a Commission, sending them 
to the ends of the earth with the message of life. 
It was the gospel, good news, the word of gracious 
announcement, containing all that God has to say to 
men’ concerning their salvation. It is the declara- 
tion of the mystery of Christ, “hid from ages and 
generations,’ now revealed as an expression of in- 
finite love to a sinning and suffering race. 

Through these agencies, the Sacrifice of Christ, 
the Work of the Holy Spirit, and the Ministry of the 
Word, it is expected and believed that the power of 
sin will be broken, the «mage of God restored in man, 
and the recovery of the world accomplished. 

It is interesting to note that the Bible is con- 
sistent throughout. It recognizes the fact of sin 
and the havoc it has wrought in the world, which 
science does not do. Moses introduces the catastro- 


150 Things Fundamental 


phe of sin, which took place first in the moral world, 
then reacted on external nature. To this view Paul 
subscribes. The close solidarity that exists between 
man and nature is held on to from first to last; 
and as injury to the bud renders the branch sterile, 
so the ruin of man depraved all creation. 

But linked with the curse that passed upon man, 
then upon the earth for man’s sake, is the promise 
of a restoration. And it is remarkable with what 
tenacity the race has held on to that promise all 
down through the ages. Christ himself (Matt. xix. 
28) promised his disciples that they should sit on 
twelve thrones with him in the regeneration, by 
which thing he meant that primal and perfect con- 
dition of things which existed before the fall. (Thay- 
er.) In Acts i. 21 Peter speaks of ‘‘the times of 
restoration of all things,” by which he meant that 
more perfect state of even physical things which 
existed before the fall. (Thayer.) In Revelation 
xxl. 1 we read of ‘‘a new heaven” and “a new earth,” 
to be substituted for the old heaven and the old 
earth, which are to pass away. 

But through creation there is development, not 
evolution. Unaided nature has not the power of re- 
demption, no more than man has the power of re- 
demption. The minerals would remain locked in 
the inorganic sphere forever, did not the plant bend 
down to the dead world beneath it and touch with 
its mystery of life the minerals and gases and bring 
them up transformed to the living sphere. (Drum- 
mond.) So the redemption of nature, the bringing 
of it toits perfect bud and flower and fruit, awaits 
“‘the manifestation of the sons of God.”’ The almond 


The Conquest of Sin 151 


would never have become the peach but for the fact 
that enlightened man cultivated and brought to 
perfection its latent possibilities. For thousands of 
years the cactus, holding in itself nourishment for 
all the herds that roamed in want the desert wilds, 
awaited the manifestation of Luther Burbank, who 
stripped the cactus of its thorns and made it an 
animal food. Through foolish superstition the lim- 
itless resources of China have lain in idleness in 
‘the earth for four thousand years, awaiting the man- | 
ifestation of the sons of China. And who knows but 
that the lightning, which for centuries crashed 
through the heavens as only a destructive force, 
was but manifesting its impatience at delay, until 
the sons of God brought it down from the clouds, 
harnessed it to their carriages, or shot it through 
a million globes to light up an otherwise night- 
wrapped world? And the end is not yet. The 
desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; the eyes 
of the blind shall be opened; the ears of the deaf un- 
stopped; the lame shall leap as a hart; the tongue 
of the dumb shall sing! 

Many of these things Christ accomplished in 
his day upon the earth. But just before he went 
away in triumph to the Father he said: “He that be- 
lieveth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; 
and greater works than these shall he do; because 
I go unto my Father.” 

It is no mean miracle for even one man to be 
made to hear the message of life, but an infinitely 
greater one to open the ears of a nation of men. 
The opening of the eyes of blind Bartimeus by 
Jesus was but a prophecy of what was yet to be 


152 Things Fundamental 


when, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the 
scales should fall from the eyes of a blinded humanity 
and men no longer look upon life as an occasion to 
lust. The multitudes marveled when Jesus cast the 
dumb devil out of one poor man, but consider for a 
moment the astonishment of angels over a whole 
redeemed world magnifying the name of Christ. 
The stilling of the tempest and the raging sea by 
Jesus was but an earnest of the completed work of 
redemption, seen by John in apocalyptic vision, 
when human eyes shall no longer be dimmed with 
tears and the sea of trouble be no more. 

There has never been one thing accomplished 
for the race outside Christianity and the allied 
agencies God has employed for the redemption and 
restoration of man. Take Christ out of human his- 
tory and the world would be plunged into utter 
darkness and despair. ‘“‘When Christ, our life, 
shall be manifested, then ye also shall be manifested 
with him in glory.”’ The hour for the manifestation 
of the sons of God draweth nigh. For that hour all 
creation longs and waits in expectation of deliv- 
erance. 


CHAPTER IX 
THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS 


RESURRECTION (from the Latin re, “again,” and 
surgere, ‘to rise’’) means a rising again. Its Greek 
equivalent is anastasis (from ana, “‘up,’”’ and histemi, 
“to rise’’), a rising wp. Owing to the distributive 
force of the prefix ana, it is not to be understood 
as a rising up merely, but as a rising up and leaving. 
But in the Scriptures there are different shades 
of meaning in the use. For example, the resurrec- 
tion which is a fact of redemption in contrast with 
such a resurrection as that of the son of the Shunam- 
mite (2 Kings iv. 36) is styled a kreisson anastasis— 
“‘a better resurrection”? (Heb. xi. 35). Such a resur- 
rection as that of the Shunammite’s son was simply 
a restoration of bodily functioning; and while he 
rose up and escaped the grave, it was only tempo- 
rary; he had at last to go back to the grave. The 
distinction between the resurrection of ‘‘the just” 
and “‘the unjust”’ must also be noted. For the just 
resurrection will mean the final abolition of the 
judicial sentence of death. They will rise out of 
and permanently leave the dominion of death. 
But for the unjust resurrection will mean only 
the transition from the first to the final execution 
of the sentence of death. After they have learned 
the possibilities of redemption by a rising from the 
dead, they must return to death forevermore (Rev. 
xx. 5, 6, 14). 

In the resurrection of “the just,’”’ as shown by 

(153) 


154. Things Fundamental 


St. Paul (1 Cor. xv.), there are three stages, and in 
each stage the dead according to ‘‘rank”’ are raised, 
“every man in his own rank.”’ Christ is the “first 
fruits.”” He is the first and only one so far who has 
been raised and passed into glory. All the rest who 
have died, with respect to their bodies, sleep in 
their graves. ‘‘Afterwards they that are Christ’s 
at his coming.” This marks the second stage. — 
The Church of the Redeemed shall rise to meet 
him at his Parousia. When that shall be we are > 
nowhere told, and it is foolish to speculate about it. 
“Then cometh the end.” A period of unknown 
duration separates between the second and third 
stage; but that “‘end”’ will be when death for all the 
saints is “swallowed up in victory.”’ When that 
“‘end’’ comes the saints who shall then be alive on 
the earth will suddenly be changed, ‘‘transformed”’ 
(Cremer)—as also all those who sleep will be— 
thereby escaping the “‘sleep”’ of the grave which all 
their other fellow saints have known, but none the 
less “‘resurrected,”’ or permanently raised out of the 
dominion and power of death. 

The doctrine of the resurrection is the central 
theme of our holy Christianity, as it is also the 
central event of history. It is the foundation of our 
faith here and of our hopes hereafter. The death 
and resurrection of Jesus are the warp and woof of 
the gospel. Without the resurrection the sacrifice 
were useless. Redemption could not have been 
complete without the resurrection, Christ died in - 
vain, men are yet in their sins, and immortality it- 
self is a nullity. The “curse” that passed upon 
man on account of his sins extended to his soul, his 


The Resurrection of Jesus 155 


body, and to external nature. The redemption 
of Jesus, to be complete, must extend as far as the 
““curse’’—the cure go as deep as the wound—and 
include the soul, the body, and external nature. The 
new body and the new earth are as essentially ob- 
jectives of the redemptive processes of Jesus as the 
new soul. 

The general doctrine of the resurrection is illus- 
trated by Paul with the seed which “‘is not quickened 
except it die.” ‘“‘The seed sown and dying is the 
analogue of the body buried and decaying’ (The 
Bible Commentary). ‘“‘Our Lord has written the 
promise of the resurrection not in books alone, 
but ‘in every leaf in springtime” (Luther). It isa 
law of nature that whatever grows does so at the 
sacrifice of that which preceded it. The germ of 
life in the seed feeds on the seed itself until the 
seed is gone, and out of the decomposed seed a new 
body is raised, the same as to kind, yet different 
because more glorious. The little seed becomes a 
plant radiant with blossoms; the acorn becomes 
a spreading oak, with new powers and glories incon- 
ceivable in the seed. So with the body of man. 
‘Tt is raised because it dies,’”’ as Chrysostom would 
say, and is the more glorious because it is thence- 
forth incorruptible, endowed with fullness of capaci- 
ty, and ruled entirely by the Spirit of God. Then 
will the fellowship of man’s spirit with God’s Spirit 
be complete and the end of redemption reached. 

The general doctrine and hope of the resurrection 
are built upon the resurrection of Jesus. With 
reference to this some general observations may 
first be made, 


156 Things Fundamental 


1. The resurrection of Jesus is perfectly conso- 
nant with his unique life and character. If the resur- 
rection be accounted extraordinary, so also were his 
life and character extraordinary. There is no dis- 
proportion whatever between his triumph over sin 
while here and his triumph over death after he was 
dead. The resurrection rounds out and completes the 
whole. And if it be said that a fact so stupendous re- 
quires to be supported by extraordinary evidence, 
even that is not wanting either in quantity or quality. 
The resurrection of Jesus is the best-attested fact in 
human history, as we shall see. 

2. The existence of a belief presupposes some proof. 
For without some foundation upon which to rest 
its feet a belief could not possibly stand. A great 
number of the world’s wisest and best men, both 
heathen and Christian, have been found in possession 
of a belief in immortality. For instance, Aristotle, 
the Greek philosopher, said: “‘Whatever that be 
within us that feels, thinks, desires, and animates 
is something celestial and divine, and consequently 
is imperishable.” Cicero, the Latin orator, said: 
“‘When I consider the wonderful activity of the 
mind, so great a memory of what is past, and sucha 
capacity for penetrating into the future; when I 
behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such 
a multitude of discoveries thence arising—I believe 
and am found persuaded that a nature which con- 
tains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.” 
Max Miiller, the great Orientalist, said: ‘“‘ Without 
a belief in personal immortality religion is like an 
arch resting on one pillar, or like a bridge ending in 
an abyss.”’ Lander, the poet, said: ‘‘Belief in a 


The Resurrection of Jesus 157 


future state is the appetite of reason.’’ Southey, an- 
other poet, said: ‘‘The Creator made us to be the 
image of his own eternity, and in the desire for 
immortality we feel we have sure proof of our ca- 
pacity for it.”” Lord Byron—poor, miserable Byron— 
said: “I feel my immortality o’ersweep all pains, 
all tears, all time, all fears; and peal like the eternal 
thunders of the deep into my ears this truth— 
‘Thou livest forever.’”’ Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 
Swiss philosopher, said: ‘‘Not all the subtleties of 
philosophy can make me doubt for a moment of 
the immortality of the soul, and of a beneficent 
providence. I feel it. I believe it. I desire it. 
I hope forit. And I will defend it to my last breath.” 
Pascal, the French philosopher, said: “I see no 
greater difficulty in believing the resurrection of the 
dead, or the conception of the Virgin, than the 
creation of the world; and it is less easy to reproduce 
a human body than it is to produce it at first.” 
Bonar Law, the Scotch divine, said: “It is the 
resurrection-life that is the truest as well as the 
highest form of life; the surest as well as the 
most glorious immortality; it admits of no reversal 
and no decay.’ Paul, the apostle, said: “For we 
know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle 
were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house 
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” 
(2 Cor. v.1). Jesus, the Son of God, said: ‘Iam the 
resurrection, and the life: He that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever 
liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 
x15; 26% 

3. Men, by their processes, are able to effect a per- 


158 Things Fundamental 


manent resurrection of solids, and it is not easy to 
understand why God cannot at least do as much as 
» men. Of course, to the man who starts out with the 
axiom that there is no God, or, if there is, we cannot 
certainly know anything about him; or that he can- 
not or does not act in the world, or, if he acts, he 
does it from necessity and not from choice; such 
an argument will make no appeal. But to the man 
looking for a basis for faith it will make a tremen- 
dous appeal. For example, one may take a block of 
ice and, by the application of heat, change it into a 
liquid. By the application of still more heat that 
liquid may be converted into gas. Now let the gas 
be heated until the point of critical temperature has 
been reached, and no process known to man is 
able to re-convert it into the liquid and solid forms. 
There is a permanent resurrection of solid matter. 
It is a fact well known to science that the heaviest 
metals can thus be converted into a gas, much 
lighter than atmosphere, after which no power of 
the chemist is equal to the task of reconverting it 
into the solid form. There is a very general belief 
that all tangible substances, from platinum to the 
most tenuous gas, are resolvable into one elemental 
substance, vastly more attenuated than hydrogen 
gas. If man can do these things—permanently 
resurrect solids—is it too great a demand on human | 
credulity to suppose that higher wisdom, with greater 
chemical resources than man knows anything about, 
can raise a human body to a point of sublimation that 
would make it equal to immortal substance? And 
would that be any greater transition than the origi- 
nal one, from metal to gas? 


The Resurrection of Jesus 159 


4, Passing on from these suppositions and ana- 
logies to the direct proofs of the resurrection of 
Jesus, we have first his prophecy of wt. All the 
evangelists bear witness that Jesus told his dis- 
ciples beforehand of the date and circumstances 
of his Passion and that he would rise again. Sane 
criticism will not deny this. Some have dared to 
say that all these utterances were manufactured 
after the event, but the records of the Evangelists 
on this point are too clear and emphatic to be 
misunderstood. There is no invention about it. 
Jesus had told the Jews long before, “Destroy 
this temple, and I will raise it up again in three 
days,’’ and that was one of the things with which 
they reproached him in the tragic hour of his death. 
That they misunderstood the prophecy, misinter- 
preted and misapplied his meaning, does not change 
the fact of the prophecy. And what will these 
critics do with the parable of the householder and 
the wicked husbandmen? No amount of juggling 
or legerdemain can wrest that out of its true realm 
as a prophecy of his violent death. And even if 
that could be done, what will they do with the Old 
Testament prophecies? Will they eviscerate Isaiah, 
emasculate the Psalms, and make every prophecy 
pointing to his Passion an article manufactured 
post eventu and inserted in the Old Record by vehe- 
ment partisans who subordinated fact to doctrine? 
No, he who saw with unerring certainty the events 
of his Passion saw also his ultimate and glorious 
triumph over the powers of the world of darkness, 
even the grave and death itself, and told them before 
it came to pass that they might believe. 


160 Things Fundamental 


5. The next witness we have is that of the empty 
tomb. Two things are universally agreed upon here: 
(1) The body of Jesus was absent from the tomb the 
third day; (2) At first that absence could be accounted 
for neither by friend nor foe. What became of the 
body? Four theories have been advanced: | 

a. The fraud theory: The disciples stole the body. 
_ This was invented and circulated first by the Jewish | 
priests, at whose wicked hands the Lord had died, 
who knew it to be false (See Matt. xxvii. 62-66; 
xxvilil. 11-15). This has been taken up and repeated 
by infidels the world over, by Celsus, in modified 
form by Salvador and by Strauss, who called the 
resurrection of Jesus “‘a world historical humbug.” 
As Schaff says, this “carries its refutation on its 
face.”’? It is to be observed first that the Jews were 
very careful to request that the tomb be sealed and 
a watch set to prevent the theft of the body, and 
their request was accordingly granted (See Matt. 
Xxvil. 62-66). If the soldiers set there to keep the 
watch were all asleep, how could they have seen the 
theft? Ifa part of them only were asleep, those who 
were awake would have prevented the theft. To 
sleep on duty meant death to the soldier, and the 
guard would not have proclaimed the fact. None 
would have dared to break the Roman seal on that 
sepulcher without express authority, much less the 
disciples who had witnessed the end of Jesus. They 
had entirely lost heart. They had witnessed the 
catastrophe, “‘when the Master went down under a 
storm of hate and contempt,” and they looked upon 
that as the end of all their dreams of position and 
power in the Messiah’s kingdom. What could they 


The Resurrection of Jesus 161 


have wanted then with that dead, mangled body? 
It could have served them to no purpose. And if 
they did steal it, what then? “A dead body under 
their hand and a lie upon their consciences never 
could have fitted the disciples to be the heroes and 
martyrs of a new dispensation”’ (Sheldon). If the 
enemy stole the body, they would have produced it 
when the news of the resurrection was spread abroad. 
No, the body was not removed from the tomb either 
by friend or foe, and the fraud theory falls to the 
ground. 

b. The swoon theory: Physical life in Jesus was 
not extinct when he was taken from the cross, only 
exhausted; he was nursed back into life by his dis- 
ciples, and afterwards died a natural death. This 
theory originated in the German camp, was ad- 
vocated strongly by Paulus of Heidelberg and in 
modified forms by others. Schaff says: “Josephus, 
Valerius Maximus, psychological and medical au- 
thorities have been searched and appealed to for 
examples of such apparent resurrections from a 
trance or asphyxy, especially on the third day, 
which is supposed to be a critical turning-point for 
life or putrefaction” (Vol. I., page 178). With 
reference to this it is to be observed that when 
Joseph begged the body of Jesus from Pilate that 
dignitary took special pains to find out from the 
centurion in charge if Jesus had been any time 
dead, and the centurion assured him that he had. 
If he had not died from suffering and physical ex- 
haustion, the spear-thrust into the region of the 
heart must have killed him. But the indications 
are that he died even before either his physical 

1h 


162 Things Fundamental 


sufferings or the spear-thrust could have brought 
the end; that is to say, he died of a broken heart. Con- 
cerning this Fairbairn says: ‘‘While he had to drink 
the cup, it would not be quite correct to say that His 
prayer (in Gethsemane) was not answered. For 
He did not pray in vain. The author of the He- 
brews says, ‘He was heard for his godly fear.’ Jesus 
died on the cross, but not of the cross. He suffered 
crucifixion, but he was not crucified. The will 
which triumphed in the conflict broke the heart 
which could not bear to endure death at the hands 
of sinners” (“‘Philosophy of the Christian Religion,” 
page 433). But even if Jesus was taken down from 
the cross in a swoon, what then? In any event he 
was placed in the tomb. To have secured the body 
and nursed it back to life, the disciples must needs 
have gone through all the difficulties enumerated 
under the fraud theory. But let us suppose that in 
spite of all the difficulties they obtained the body: 
what then? Strauss, before his ‘“‘lapse’’ into 
materialism and atheism, was an advocate of the 
“vision theory.” In support of that theory and 
against the “swoon theory” he wrote: “One who 
crept forth half dead from the grave, and crawled 
about a sickly patient, who had need of medical care, 
of bandaging, nursing, and strengthening, and who 
must still in the end succumb to his sufferirgs, 
could not have made upon the disciples the impres- 
sion that he was the conqueror of death and the 
grave and the prince of life, which lay back of their 
ensuing activity. Such a resurrection would simply 
have weakened the impression made upon them by 
his life and death; by no possibility could it have 


The Resurrection of Jesus 163 


transformed their sorrow into enthusiasm, their 
reverence into worship.” If his argument was cor- 
rect before his “‘lapse,’”’ it was correct afterwards. 
Nothing could change the force of these words. 
The “swoon theory” is wholly inadequate as an 
explanation of the empty tomb. 

ce. The vision theory: Jesus arose in the imagination 
of his disciples; their wish was father to the thought, 
and the belief once started spread with the power of a 
religious epidemic. This theory was advocated by 
the Jewish philosopher Spinoza and was afterwards 
elaborately carried out by Strauss and Renan. 
Strauss traced it to the apostles in Galilee; Renan, 
to Mary Magdalene, whose hallucinated passion, 
as he blasphemously says, “gave to the world a 
risen God.” (‘Life of Jesus,” page 387.) Here 
it requires to be observed that the resurrection of 
Jesus was contrary to “the experience of nature,’ 
so far.as it had been given to men to observe that 
“experience.”’ Even the Jews themselves had no 
adequate idea of the resurrection of the dead, and 
one sect of them denied it altogether. The world was 
not accustomed to that sort of thing, and we have 
already learned from Paul that Jesus was the very 
first who ever arose from the grave in a redemptive 
sense. How could those disciples then have built 
up an expectation on a hope that he would rise? 
or how could they have even wished that he would 
rise? Such a thing would have been contrary to all 
reason. They were completely defeated. As Schaff 
says, “For two days they were trembling on the 
brink of despair.”” In the next place it must be 
noted that the “visions”? ended abruptly on the 


164 Things Fundamental 


fortieth day. If they saw “visions” and dreamed 
dreams for forty days, why did they not continue, 
at least during the lifetime of those disciples? At 
any rate none will accuse Saul of Tarsus as desiring 
and wishing the resurrection of Jesus. How is one 
to understand his “vision”? down yonder on the 
Damascus road, which he expressly asserts was the 
last? If that was not true, it is a most remarkable 
instance of hallucination. To account for the 
resurrection of Jesus on the ‘“‘vision theory” is 
to make a greater demand on human credulity 
than the naked doctrine of the resurrection itself 
makes. For, as Sheldon says, it “amounts prac- 
tically to an attempt to escape miracle at the expense 
of attributing miraculous virtue to illusion. It 
strains rational conviction to the point of torture 
when we are asked to conclude that a mere ghost, 
dressed up by a distempered imagination, could have 
wrought such a mighty and substantial result.” 
(“System of Christian Doctrine,” page 584.) No, 
the tomb cannot be emptied by the “‘vision theory.” 

d. The historical fact: Jesus rose from the dead. 

6. And this brings us to our sixth witness, the 
Angel of the Resurrection, who delivered the first 
Easter message the world had ever heard. He first 
gives expression to a startling fact, “‘ He is not here’; 
next, assigns a reason, “for he is risen’’; then adduces 
two undeniable evidences of it: Christ’s prophecy, 
“‘as he said,’’ and the empty tomb, “‘Come, see the 
place where the Lord lay”’ (Matt. xxviii. 6). 

7. Our next witness is the historical account given 
by the four historians of the Church. Though there 
is variation in them as to details, all agree on the 


The Resurection of Jesus 165 


one great fact of the resurrection. Now, was this gos- 
pel story due to an agreement among the historians? 
If so, they made a poor showing in keeping their 
agreement. No man can read the resurrection 
stories by the evangelists without coming to the con- 
clusion that they are four separate and independent 
accounts. There are too many discrepancies in them 
for them to have been agreed upon beforehand. Are 
they then four separate and independent fabrica- 
tions or myths? All the indications go to prove 
that the evidence in them was secured from eyewit- 
nesses, and the points of similarity make it impos- 
sible for these stories to have been fabrications. 
Since they could not have manufactured the story 
in collusion, nor independently fabricated it, the 
conclusion necessarily follows that the gospel writers 
gave a true account of what they themselves saw 
or received directly from eyewitnesses. 

8. The Christophanies, or appearances of Jesus. 
His first appearance was to Mary Magdalene, who, 
upon her approach to the tomb, found it empty and 
“stood without at the sepulcher weeping,’ when 
Jesus appeared to her and said, “Woman, why 
weepest thou?” “‘She, supposing it was the gardener, 
saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, 
tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him 
away.” Then Jesus said to her, “Mary,” which 
revealed his identity, and brought from her the 
reply, “Master.’”’? Soon after he was seen by Peter, 
according to Paul, though under what circumstances 
it is not known (1 Cor. v.15). Inthe afternoon of the 
same day he appeared to two disciples on the way 
to Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 18), and in the evening to the 


166 Things Fundamental 


assembled apostles, Thomas absent (John xx. 19). 
To the assembled disciples he appeared again on the 
next Sunday, Thomas present (John xx. 26-28). He 
made his appearance to seven of the apostles at 
the Lake of Tiberias (John xxi. 1-14). He appeared 
to more than ‘‘five hundred brethren at once,” of 
whom the greater part were living at the time Paul 
wrote (1 Cor. xv. 6). He appeared to James the 
Just, called in Galatians i. 19 the brother of the Lord, 
who did not believe in him before his resurrection, 
but did afterwards, and died a martyr to the faith 
(1 Cor. xv. 7). “Last of all, he was seen of” Paul, 
who was as one born out of season (1 Cor. xv. 8). 

Two things are to be noted with reference to these 
“‘appearances’’: (a) Jesus was not at first recognized 
by any of his disciples; and (b) Jesus did not make 
a single appearance to an enemy. As the Gospel 
writers simply record the facts without attempting 
an explanation, it is idle to enter into speculation 
about them, only to say that these could not have 
been fabrications. For if fabrications, what would 
have been more probable than for them to say that 
Jesus appeared to Caiaphas and Pilate and terrified 
them by his reappearance from the dead? 

9. The moral transformation of his disciples. We 
have already noted the state of despair into which 
the apostolic company fell upon the crucifixion of 
Jesus. But immediately upon his reappearance they 
themselves became as men raised from the dead. 
Joy like an electric thrill shot through them, and 
they immediately became witnesses of the resurrec- 
tion. The message of the angel at the tomb was 
echoed and reéchoed throughout the Christian 


The Resurrection of Jesus 167 


household. Peter, in the first Christian sermon 
preached in the new dispensation, made the doctrine 
of the resurrection his central theme. Paul pressed 
upon the philosophers of Athens the resurrection of 
Jesus. It is the doctrine which all preached, in the 
hope of which they lived and in defense of which 
they died. 

10. The Christian Church. The Easter message 
which lifted those early disciples out of their gloom, 
enkindled their hopes, gave them boldness of faith, 
and fired their hearts to preach a risen and living 
Christ from Jerusalem to Rome, until they laid 
down their lives in martyrdom, has had precisely the 
same effect upon men in all succeeding centuries. 
It appeals to all that is heroic in man. It is a chal- 
lenge to the impossible. It has been this faith in 
men that has changed unbelievers into believers and 
made increasing contributions to that great com- 
pany who have gone up through great tribulations 
and washed their robes and made them white in the 
blood of the Lamb. It was this faith that gave birth 
to the Christian Church, which is the most real and 
mighty of all the facts earth knows anything about, 
that has lived now for these nineteen hundred years 
and spread all over the civilized world, “exercising 
more moral power than all the kingdoms and all 
other religions combined”’ (Schaff, ‘‘ History of the 
Christian Church,” Vol. I., page 183). The Chris- 
tian Church is the last and greatest evidence of the 
resurrection of Jesus. 

With all this testimony, with what complete 
assurance may we repeat that part of the Apostles’ 
Creed, ‘The third day he rose again from the dead.”’ 


CHAPTER X 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 


THERE is nothing with which we are more famil- 
iar than light, yet there is nothing which we un-. 
derstand less.. What is light? Scientifically de- 
fined, it is that force by the action of which objects 
are rendered visible; that is to say, capable of 
being seen. To more fully understand its operation, 
we must suppose that there is a kind of fluid of 
extreme tenuity, or thinness, called ether, which 
constitutes a kind of universal atmosphere. That 
is to say, this ether is diffused through all space. 
It is so subtle that it fills the pores of all bodies, 
eludes the finest tests of the chemist, passes in 
through the glass of the receiver, and remains even 
in the vacuum of the air pump. Now, when the 
peculiar light-producing force which emanates from 
a luminous body, as the sun, sets this universal 
ether-atmosphere into wave-motions, these wave- 
motions impinge upon the eye and are converted in 
the mysterious structures of the retina into stimuli 
of the optic nerves, which in turn produce in the 
brain the peculiar sensation we call light. 

The light which comes streaming down to us from 
the sun is what is commonly known to science as 
“white light,” and strangely enough is not primary, 
but composite, in its nature. For if a sunbeam be 
passed through a prism, it will be broken up into 
seven primary colors—viz., violet, indigo, blwe, green, 
yellow, orange, and red. Or, if the tiny prisms, the 

~ (168) 


The Light of the World 169 


raindrops, catch up the sun’s rays in their fall from 
the sky, they flash the “bow of promise”’ across the 
bosom of the storm cloud. 

What may be stranger still, by far the greater 
part of the solar spectrum is imperceptible to the 
human eye. For the spectrum extends beyond the 
violet and the red rays, as has been proved by test; 
and these mysterious rays—nct seen, but felt through 
the pulse of chemistry, though they may constitute 
within themselves possibilities of exquisite and 
delicate coloring, are only known by the almost 
meaningless terms of ultra-violet and infra-red. 

Light is not only pulsations of ether-waves; it is 
the source of beauty, life, and power. Professor 
Steele, in his “ Natural Science,” says: 

The sunbeam comes to the earth simply as motion of 
ether-waves, yet it is the only source of beauty, life, and 
power. In the growing plant, the burning coal, the flying 
bird, the glaring lightning, the blooming flower, the rushing 
engine, the roaring cataract, and the pattering rain we see 
only varied manifestations of this all energizing force. 


It required light to drive back the darkness that 
brooded over the bosom of chaos in the morning 
of time. It requires light for all vegetable life. 
It requires sunlight to impart the green coloring 
matter to the leaves of plants, which in turn en- 
ables them to decompose the atmospheric carbonic 
acid necessary to the plants’ vitalization and growth. 
It requires the force of the rapidly vibrating solar 
ray to tear asunder the atoms of carbon and oxygen, 
and thereby enable the plant leaves to decompose, 
take up, and assimilate the carbon and set free the 
oxygen, so necessary for all animal life. 


170 Things Fundamental 


In the germination of plant life the ultra-violet 
rays, which by a wise provision of nature are always 
greatly in excess in spring, and in the processes of 
growth and development the infra-red, play es- 
sential parts. By the operation of these strange 
and unseen forces all animate things on the earth 
live, move, and have their being, and may with all 
truth be called “the children of light.” 

Next in importance to light itself, in the bringing 
out of the beautiful, are the media of refraction and 
reflection. All the hues of a landscape, the delicate 
beauty of a picture, the halos of the sun, the coronas 
of the moon, the gorgeous summer clouds that span 
the sky at the rising and the setting of the sun, are 
but results of the refraction and the reflection of the 
sun’s rays as they sweep in their prodigious flight 
from heaven to earth. 

The light which plays upon your face and wor- 
ries you, as you sit in your library and try to study, 
is but a reflection of the sun’s rays by the glass 
in the hands of that mischievous boy across the 
street. The quiet lake, mirroring in its liquid 
bosom cool, spreading groves, to which the Arab of 
the desert hastens in vain to slake his thirst and 
rest, is but an optical illusion, a mirage in the desert 
to be pursued but never reached, produced by the 
refraction of the sun’s rays by the superheatéd 
overlying layers of air. Whether, then, the objects 
we see be real or illusive depends upon the media 
which refract and reflect the light. 

But it is not my purpose to take more time here 
in a discussion of the primary meaning and uses 
of light. The word has a metaphorical meaning 


The Light of the World 171 


as well, and when so used customarily refers to that 
flood of knowledge and experience which comes 
streaming in upon us from all the past history of 
the world. It is my purpose to view this subject 
in a broad and general sense, then restrict it to the 
specific. 

It is our boast that we live in an age of prog- 
ress. And indeed the world has never before seen 
such an era of varied industry and prosperity. The 
great movements and events that have marked this 
era have been fulJl of energy, of power. The foun- 
tains of the great deep have been broken up, and a 
flood of change has swept over and submerged the 
ideas and institutions amidst which past generations 
groped their way in blindness. Ignorance and su- 
perstition have given way to knowledge and convic- 
tion; theory in large measure has surrendered to fact. 

A thousand new inventions leap to light with 
the birth of each new day. The printing press has 
popularized knowledge; labor-saving machines have 
revolutionized industry. The humming spindle, the 
twirling spool, the flying shuttle—all moving with 
the rapidity of the lightning—blend their voices in a 
common note of triumph. To-day one is in the 
United States; ten days from now he can be in China. 
In the history of the seventeenth century we read 
of ‘a Thirty Years’ War’’; in the history of our own 
times, of a war in which the ancient Spanish Em- 
pire was conquered and the little republic of Cuba 
created in less than three months. Steam and 
electricity have practically annihilated time and 
space. The world has been reduced to a smaller 
sphere, so to speak, and has been sent spinning with 


172 Things Fundamental 


increased velocity down the ringing grooves of 
change. 

Science has ransacked nature, challenged and 
dissected everything it met, and, undazzled even by 
the shekinah of the Supreme philosophy, has entered 
the courts of heaven and dared to speculate on the 
life and being of God. Archzeologists have unearthed 
and read the inscriptions of buried civilizations. 
The chemist has all but discovered the Philosopher’s 
Stone. Geologists have dug into the bowels of earth 
and traced plant and animal life said to have existed 
millions of years ago. Astronomy has crossed the 
gulfs of space, caught and weighed in the balance 
worlds too distant to be seen by the unaided eye. 
Scientists have determined that the chemical ele- 
ments of Arcturus and the sun are identical; that 
the raindrops and sand grains of Paleozoic times 
are like those of our day; and that the phenomena 
of light and gravitation in the farthest stars are 
the same as in our earth. 

Methuselah is said to have lived 969 years. In 
fifty years of our time one sees more, feels more, 
lives more than Methuselah did in his more than 
nine and one-half centuries. Old things have passed 
away. Behold, all things are become new. Prome- 
theus has rekindled his torch at the chariot wheel 
of the sun, and reéndowed the human race. What is 
this endowment? History calls it progress. Learn- 
ing calls it knowledge. Science calls it evolution. 
Society calls it civilization. Wisdom ealls it LIGHT. 

Since the advent of science there has been an 
unnecessary warfare waged between religion and 
science, each in large measure despising the prop- 


The Light of the World 173 


aganda of the other and doing his utmost to destroy 
them. Such attacks on religion as those of Draper, 
in his “Conflict between Religion and Science,” are 
as bitter and unwarranted as the most vicious attack 
ever made on science by religion, and have had the 
effect of dividing the world into parties. Both re- 
ligion and science, in their own proper development, 
have been hampered by their own extremists and 
fanatics. Had that deference been shown that was 
due from each to other, they could have been mutual- 
ly helpful and thereby more materially benefited the 
world. Out of it all, however, one good has come: 
each has gradually forced the other to abandon un- 
untenable positions. 

A great hue and cry has been raised over “crea- 
tion,” “‘the age of the world,” and “‘the history of 
man.” If matter was not ‘‘created,’”’ then it is “self- 
existent,’ and matter is God. If the advocates of 
the older theology deserve to be scored because of 
their “carpenter theory”’ of the universe, the scien- 
tists cannot claim exemption from censure on ac- 
count of their ridiculous ‘evolution theory.” If 
the “rib story” of the origin of Eve provoke a smile 
on the face of the scientist, let him not be grieved 
if the theologian smile when he reads ‘‘the fun- 
damental law of biogeny”’ which says that “all ani- 
mals, including man, descended originally from a 
one-celled organism,” which “one-celled organism’’ 
was of necesssity biserual. How did the Scientific 
Eve get out of the side of the Scientific Adam? 

The system of chronology devised by Archbishop 
Ussher and used in the Bible is no part of the orig- 
inal revelation; and if there be any fault in the 


174 Things Fundamental 


system, the fault is that of the system itself and 
not of the Bible. 

Let those who are disposed to abuse the theo- 
logians on account of their anthropomorphic con- 
ception of God remember that man cannot make 
mental representations except in terms of his ex- 
perience. In mechanics there are six simple ma- 
chines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the 
inclined plane, the wedge, and the screw. As the 
wheel and axle are but a modified form of the lever, 
the wedge and the screw modified forms of the in- 
clined plane, the number of simple machines really 
reduces to three: the lever, the pulley, and the in- 
clined plane. It is impossible to construct a machine 
except in terms of one or more of these. A machine, 
however complicated, cannot be known outside of 
mechanical experience. So in the science of thought 
nothing can be mentally represented outside of 
experience. If God is to be represented at all in 
thought, it is most likely he would be represented in 
terms of experience by that which is highest in human 
experience; that is to say, by a man; really, a sort of 
superman. “He that made the eye, shall he not see? 
He that made the ear, shall he not hear?’ 

If errors have been discovered in an ¢nfallible 
Bible, let science remember in humility of heart 
that, with all her “‘continuity of nature,” her ‘“un- 
breakable laws,” her “inerrancy,” she has committed 
her blunders and been compelled to re-write her 
creed. The French Academy, one of the leading 
scientific institutions of the world, at different times 
in its history, rejected as utterly unscientific the 
therapeutic effects of quinine in medical practice, 


The Light of the World 1 G5: 


vaccination for smallpox, the use of lightning con- 
ductors, and the steam engine. 

After all, what is this boasted science but the 
soaring of an insect? Empirical knowledge con- 
fessedly rests upon the data of experience. Beyond 
that it cannot go. Geology can no more extend its 
observations beyond the point in time when the 
earth began to be than astronomy can extend its 
observations beyond the stellar universe as such. 
What was back of those beginnings they cannot 
know. Since science is limited to ‘‘phenomena”’ and 
can rightfully have nothing to do with “origins,” is 
concerned with ‘‘sequence” and not with “‘causa- 
tion,” “Laplace was right in saying that science has 
neither need nor room for God.” 

With religion the question is different. It at- 
tempts an investigation into “the relation of the 
Creating to the Created,” which Mr. Spencer calls 
‘transcendent audacity.’”’ When the question of Zo- 
phar is put, “‘Canst thou by searching find out God?” 
religion, like science, answers, “No,’’ and beyond 
science, ‘‘not to perfection by any process.” Reli- 
gion does not presume to know all about God, still 
it presumes to know something. While the idea of 
God is not a matter to be abstractly wrought out; 
while God, as a final postulate of thought, is in- 
capable of demonstration; yet it does not follow 
that he must be “unknown and unknowable.” Re- 
ligion postulates a background of the universe that 
can be and is known in experience, not ‘a back- 
ground which darkens and dwarfs the deepest facts 
of the intellectual life.” Instead of resting its con- 
clusions solely on the ground of experience, religion 


176 Things Fundamental 


contends for a revelation, out of which, in conjunction 
with experience, its dogmas arise. If it be supposed 
that we are estopped from supposing a revelation 
because the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, 
the objection is overthrown by the fact that 
religion is universal, and somehow millions of men 
have comprehended enough of God, his nature and 
attributes, as to think of him, not as a mere abstrac- 
tion, as some of the philosophers hold, but as a 
person, as the Scriptures teach. Is it not poor 
reasoning to suppose that a cause equal to the task 
of putting matter, life, and conscience here is un- 
equal to the task of revealing himself to his in- 
telligent earthly creature? 

But who is this ‘Infinite’ of whom the scien- 
tists speak? Though the demands of etymology, 
strictly adhered to, may hold us to the conclusion 
that the “Infinite” has no limits, the demands of 
reason require that he be not involved in a self-con- 
tradiction. To affirm an abstract greatness and ex- 
clude the fundamental factors of self-knowledge and 
self-determination means to shut God up in eternal 
darkness and resolve our mental and moral life into 
insoluble enigmas. 

Only in mechanics does the doctrine hold, “‘ Action 
and reaction are equal.” Where a personal agent 
is involved, it only measures the power put forth. 
It does not signify that the power exerted is the 
whole power. If we assume that the force or power 
that created the sidereal systems which meet our 
gaze as we look up into the depths of space on a 
cloudless night could not have created multiplied 
millions more, it is tantamount to assuming that the 


The Light of the World 177 


power behind creation is a physical force and not a 
personal agent. 

Now, the person or power that created the uni- 
verse did it either from necessity or choice. Neces- 
sity implies an endless series; for if the universe 
was created from necessity, then back of the power 
that created was a power that compelled the creation, 
and so the series runs on forever, and there is no 
beginning. If we assume a physical force as the be- 
ginning, we involve the first cause in a contradiction, 
for mere unintelligent force could never itself have 
begun to act. Freedom implies a new commence- 
ment, and the power creating acted from choice. If 
the power that created the universe acted from 
choice, then the power that created was a per- 
son, for only personality is free. If, then, we 
assume personality as the background of the uni- 
verse, the empiricists charge that we involve the 
Infinite in a contradiction; for personality implies 
limitations, and the Infinite cannot be both unlimited 
and limited at one and the same time. 

It is only when the term “‘Infinite’’ is erroneously 
used as the synonym of all existence that person- 
ality becomes incompatible with God’s infinitude. 
Personality in God does not imply that there must 
be an eternal not-self for him to react against in 
order to come to self-knowledge. Even in human 
self-knowledge there are two factors, a feeling of self 
and a conception of self. The infant has no sort of 
conception of self, but a decided feeling of self. 
Even after he begins to sit alone and feed himself, 
he will sometimes offer food to his toe, showing 
that he has no adequate conception that the toe is 

12 


178 Things Fundamental 


a part of himself. But stick a pin into that toe, 
and see how quickly he manifests a consciousness of 
self. This consciousness of self is independent of 
all experience; it is derived; the child is born with 
it. So God, having nothing back of him, being 
conditioned by nothing but his own will and the im- 
plications of his own perfections, did not need to 
import something from another realm in order to 
come to an understanding of self. 

With this in mind we are compelled to conclude 
that if the universe is limited, the power behind 
it is self-limited; for the very nature of things for- 
bids that we should suppose it limited by any power 
greater than its own. Here, then, we have an ex- 
planation: Man works by laws that are fixed for him, 
which he cannot alter and within the range of which 
he ts free; God, by laws that he has fixed for himself, 
which he will not alter and within the range of which he 
is free. This does away with the excuse for trans- 
ferring to God all the limitations under which man 
labors, and our comparison is now between one 
conditioned group of works and another, the one 
imposed, the other self-imposed. 

Now, if one set of works be taken to imply per- 
sonality, why may not the other set of works be tak- 
en to imply personality? Are we barred from the 
conclusion of personality because one of the persons 
is infinite? Must we stop with the things of time 
and sense? Hedged in by our finite limitations must 
we forever cry, “Ne plus ultra”? For instance, does 
our unconsciousness of the whole wide range of har- 
mony mean that we cannot think of. sound beyond 
our range? While we can form no conception of 


The Light of the World Eee 


“the music of the spheres,’ are we barred from 
thinking that it is? Is there no ear to hear beyond 
our own? And does this anthropomorphic concep- 
tion of God mean that God’s ears must be fashioned 
like our own? Or, again, for me space is finite. Its 
boundary or limit is the horizon that meets my eye 
in every direction. By use of the glass I am able to 
lift that horizon and set it back to that distant 
border, 


‘**Where frontier suns fling out their useless light’’; 


still I cannot abrogate it. I cannot think of that 
as the end. There is something in my thought that 
tells me, in spite of my experience, that beyond 
that border where finite limitations hedge me in 
space runs on forever. How am I in possession of 
that consciousness? I cannot say that I came by it 
through experience, for I know nothing beyond the 
limits to which I have gone. I cannot say that it 
is an inheritance from my ancestors, for they had 
no greater consciousness of space than I have. The 
conclusion is therefore fastened upon me that the 
idea of space is intuitive, belongs to the consti- 
tution of mind; and while finite limitations pre- 
clude the possibility of my having infinite space as 
an object of consciousness, they put no bar what- 
ever to my having it as an object of belief. And as 
experience widens intuition, none the less certain 
because with wonder, responds to the ever-widening 
program until the last star that infinity holds may be 
swept into consciousness. I may therefore conceive 
that something 7s without being compelled to think 
how it is. If we must stop in every instance when 


180 Things Fundamental 


we reach the infinities, then our whole system of 
higher mathematics is sheer nonsense. 

Then consider with me fora moment. I know that 
I am. I know that I possess a will, because I am 
free. I know that what I do I do as a result of my 
will. By watching their modes of operation I con- 
clude that my fellow beings around me are as I am 
and that their works are likewise the result of will. 
Surveying the vast framework of the universe, I put 
to myself the question, “How did it come to be 
there?’ Does my reason answer, “‘Chance’’? No, 
“Will.” 

I have just said that I know I am free. How do 
I know it? I find in consciousness a sense of duty, 
a feeling of self-approbation, of self-condemnation 
and remorse, according as my actions vary. Then I 
must be free. A creature that acts from “necessity” 
could feel neither delight nor condemnation. If I 
am free, and the works I do are the result of will, 
it inevitably follows that will was responsible for 
my being, and that that will was free. 

Freedom and Necessity—of the two contradictory 
inconceivables, which? And because I assert free- 
dom, something that my finite limitations will not 
permit me to conceive (nor would they had I ‘as- 
serted necessity), does that imply that my reason- 
ing is false? No, it signifies that it is weak. To 
put the limitations of human personality upon God, 
to weigh God down with the limitations of man, to 
assert that because the human cannot conceive of 
freedom the divine cannot, is to do the very thing 
these scientists and philosophers claim to abhor— 
limit the unlumitable, 


The Light of the World 181 


A sense of duty in man implies a moral govern- 
ment and governor. How an “inscrutable mystery” 
that lies back of all phenomena, all sensation, all 
feeling, could work certain effects in me; how an “‘un- 
known cause”’ could produce a sense of duty in me, 
without that cause being a person and a concrete 
embodiment of that moral sense, is a dogma of phi- 
losophy and science that is utterly unthinkable. 
And how the scientists and philosophers, in view 
of that fact, could raise the hue and cry that has 
been raised in certain quarters over the dogmas of 
religion is passing strange. But often those who 
decry dogma tn religion venerate rt in science and phi- 
losophy! 

But what has all this to do with the great fun- 
damental truths of religion? What with man’s condi- 
tion and destiny? Were all the rubbish cleared away 
from this controversy, but five prime facts would re- 
main: Gop, MAN, SIN, CHRIST, SALVATION. These 
five constitute all there is worth while both in time 
and in eternity. For the earth is here, one of 
millions of worlds, and among them one of the least. 
Its importance lies in the fact that it is the home of 
man, a creature of intelligence and dignity. Sin is 
here, that awful fact to which the conscience of man 
bears witness that he is very far gone from God and 
original righteousness. Christ is here, the evidence 
of God’s desire to lift his misguided creature out 
of his ruin and misery. He came to reveal the Father, 
to open the mystery “‘hid from ages and generations,”’ 
and to bring life and immortality to light. Nor is 
it for a moment to be supposed that this will be 
the end of “‘revelations,”’ for in the unfolding and 


182 Things Fundamental 


endless ages to come there will be yet fuller mani- 
festations of things which the eye hath not seen, 
nor the ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man. 

This light which floods the world to-day is not 
primary, but composite, in its nature. If it be passed 
through the prism, so to speak, it will be broken 
up into primary colors, which, for all practical 
purposes, may be called the Hebrew, the Grecian, and 
the Roman rays. But because the spectrum only re- 
veals to us these three, we are not to infer that 
they constitute all there is of light, for through 
the pulse of history we are able to feel the mighty 
throbbings of those unseen ethnic forces that have 
contributed so much to the growth and development 
of the world’s civilization. 

The oldest civilization of which we have any 
authentic history is that of Egypt. When it began 
we cannot positively know. Around its beginnings 
hang the mists of bygone and forgotten centuries. 
But certain inscriptions which have in comparative- 
ly late years been deciphered seem to indicate that 
the first dynasty began some five thousand years 
before Christ. There were thirty-one of these dy- 
nasties in all, and around the history of these dy- 
nasties there cluster a world of memories. Here 
grew up and flourished the most massive architecture 
the world has ever seen. Here Sinai was born and 
Calvary cradled. Here reigned and ruled that 
splendid line of Pharaohs until conquered by Cam- — 
byses five hundred and twenty years before Christ— 
more than four thousand years of unbroken glory. 
Here arose Carthage, that splendid rival of Rome, 


The Light of the World 183 


which drew from old Cato the continued utterance, 
Carthago delenda est. 

But Egypt was not only the birthplace of civ- 
ilization: it was the scene of its almost total an- 
nihilation as well; for now the ruins of Carthage, 
of Memphis, and of Thebes tell of Hannibal dead, of 
the Ptolemies dead, of the Pharaohs dead—all tell 
painful stories of mighty empires dead. The only 
enduring monuments of Egypt’s magnificence and 
glory are the triumphs of the Sinai she bore and the 
Calvary she cradled. What we have seen the ultra- 
violet rays are to the germination of plant life, Egypt 
was to the germination of civilization. Changing the 
figure, Egypt lit the torch of civilization, and with 
the lighting her mission among the nations of the 
earth was fulfilled. Her glory paled into night, and, 
to use the language of Israel’s prophet, ‘‘there was 
no more a prince of the land of Egypt.”’ 

But God’s purpose for man in the world was that 
he should ever advance. Through his intervention 
in human affairs there have been certain points 
fixed in man’s development back of which he should 
neverregress. The light that Egypt gave to the world 
was destined never to goout. Through theages God’s 
increasing purpose ran, and that purpose was to 
bring mankind to the point where the kingdom of 
Christ could be set up in the world. To this end it 
was necessary that the human race (or, rather, cer- 
tain families of it) should be developed along certain 
lines—lines destined to converge “‘in the fullness 
of time” at the birth of Christ. 

First, it was necessary that man’s spiritual nature 
should be developed. For this purpose the Hebrew 


184 Things Fundamental 


was chosen. At the beginning of his history the 
world was almost wholly idolatrous, and idolatry al- 
ways degrades, never uplifts, man. In order to 
advance, man must be taught a right conception 
of God and brought into right relations with him. 
How well the Jew performed his part we know. 
He first caught {the light of civilization from 
Egypt, and when he reached his “Promised Land’’ 
he expended all his energies upon the develop- 
ment of the religious idea. His government was 
a theocracy; his prophets were greater than his kings. 
His national airs were hymns of Jehovah’s triumphs, 
and his whole literature breathed with a religious 
fervor. As soon as he had learned the one great 
lesson, his people were scattered all over the world. 
When they returned from the ‘‘Great Captivity” at 
Babylon—forever cured of idolatry—they settled 
on the shores of the Caspian Sea, along the banks 
of the Euphrates River, throughout Lydia and 
Phrygia, in Egypt, in all southern Europe, even at 
Rome. And wherever the Jew went, there he erected 
a synagogue and began to “‘proselyte’’ and teach 
his national religion. 

There also had to be an intellectual as well as 
a spiritual development. To this purpose the Greeks 
were peculiarly adapted. Like the Jews, they first 
sat at the feet of Egypt. From that fountain Py- 
thagoras, Homer, Plato, Lycurgus, and Solon drank, 
taking from its fullness all that was necessary for the 
completion of their great works. Living as the 
Greeks did along the sea, with a climate free from 
extremes, with a pure blue sky, with an exhilarat- 
ing atmosphere, with a wealth of landscape em- 


The Light of the World 185 


bracing mountain and valley and river and seas, 
it is no wonder that they developed such a 
remarkable sense of the beautiful. Amid such 
surroundings everything was alive with music and 
poetry and art. They chiseled their conceptions in 
immortal marble and set every naked promontory 
of Greece a-gleaming with fanes and shrines and 
statues and temples sacred to their immortal gods. 
Their language was poetry itself, a fit vehicle for 
the conveyance of religious truth. Never had the 
world seen such a period of activity. Phidias carved, 
Apelles painted, Pericles spoke, and Homer sang. 
At the very apex of Grecian culture Alexander arose, 
and by his brilliant conquests pressed the die of 
Grecian civilization upon more than one-half the 
inhabitants of the globe. The Grecian genius, at 
once comprehensive and assimilating, secured its 
culture, and the language was spoken from the 
AXgean Sea to the Indus River. 

But there must be physical development, as well 
as spiritual and intellectual. Spirit and intellect 
without a body of strength would have been ine 
sufficient for the accomplishment of the world’s task. 
This work was assigned to the Roman. He was to 
reach out and gather together the world’s odds and 
ends and shape them into a compact whole. As one 
of their own writers saw it: “It was for others to 
work brass into breathing shape, others to be elo- 
quent and describe the circling movements of the 
heavens and tell the rising of the stars. Thy work, 
O Roman, is to rule the nations; these be thine acts, 
to impose the conditions of the world’s peace, to show 
mercy to the fallen, and to crush the proud.” For 


186 Things Fundamental 


such a task as that well-nigh superhuman strength 
was required. Hence, the matchless contests of the 
Roman arena, which developed and sent into the 
armies, to carry her conquering eagles to the ends of 
the earth, the mightiest gladiators the world has 
ever known. 

Now, when the Roman strength was complete; 
when her highways had become the world’s great 
arteries; when men out of every nation under heaven 
began to surge back and forth, to and from Rome, 
the world’s great heart and center—then the three 
great lines along which Hebrew, Greek, and Roman 
had been developed began to converge; the lights of 
their respective civilizations blended into one; the 
time had fully come; and, behold, the herald angel 
announced the Advent of the Son of God to the 
astonished shepherds in the Judean hills. 

Through all the centuries some light from the 
face of God had been streaming into the face of man. 
In nature, life, and conscience itself this light had 
been variously felt. Now the true spiritual light 
appeared, but he was a light shining in darkness. 
That light ignorance and the associated wickedness 
of the world did not lay hold upon, appropriate, and 
make their own. He even came unto his own, and 
his own received him not. He gathered around him 
certain men to be reflectors of his light, and con- 
stituted them ‘“‘the light of the world.” Since they 
combined in them the spirituality of the Jew, the 
mind of the Greek, and the manhood of the Roman— 
the inheritance of the ages—they were eminently 
qualified to nurture, to conserve, to propagate, to be 


The Light of the World 187 


the true media of refraction and reflection, to shine 
out into the darkness and lighten the world. 

Thus was a new era inaugurated. Christianity 
became, so to speak, the infra-red rays of civili- 
zation. This strange and new force was to complete 
the work that Egypt began, to ripen the fruit of 
that civilization which Egypt had germinated. The 
history of its progress is the history of the greatest 
struggle this world has ever seen. It is more thrilling 
than any romance. To keep it in security it was 
shut up in the monasteries during the Dark Ages, 
but it secured its freedom in the Renaissance. Its 
spirit was tested by the fires of the Inquisition, but 
the Reformation of Luther triumphed and burst upon 
the world in a flood of glory. 

From the earliest dawn, when its first pencilings 
of light appeared upon the world’s horizon, and 
ancient barbarity began to be displaced by Christian 
piety, its power has been steadily manifest upon 
the world. To it we owe all the good of our present 
civilization. To it we owe the spirit of altruism. 
To it we owe the protection of life and property. 
To it we owe the sacred principles of liberty, jus- 
tice, and righteousness. From it have come the idea 
of the cosmopolitan, or world-citizen, prophecy of 
a world-brotherhood. By it womanhood has 
been redeemed and lifted out of servitude and li- 
centiousness to places of authority and honor. The 
formative period of the world had been one of con- 
test, of conquest, of carnage, of war. Brute force 
wrote its history in blood. In the rampage of the 
battle field, the forum, and the Senate the voice of 
innocence and virtue was hushed. Law knew no 


188 Things Fundamental 


love; civic institutions, no justice. But man could 
make no law that would control men; force could in- 
vent nothing to conquer men. It required love, 
Christ-born love instilled into the heart of woman, to 
disarm the world and make its people brothers! 

If I have thus far been logical and correct in my 
reasoning, it will be seen that the primary object 
of all education is the development of body, mind, 
and soul. Strength, intellect, and religion—these 
three—but the greatest of these is religion. In many 
of our States our legislators have pandered to infidel 
ideas and the demands of our foreign-born citizen- 
ship until the Bible has been completely shut out 
of our public schools. This is a grave mistake. Take 
religion away from education, and you take away its 
spirit. It is thenceforth good for nothing. For all 
worthy purposes it is as dead as the body when its 
spirit is gone. And when the State thus surrenders 
the Bible, it surrenders its right to educate, and 
education thenceforth becomes the duty and work of 
the Church. Our fathers carved out of the wilderness 
this nation of ours. They planted their institutions 
upon the Word of God. Our poets, warriors, heroes, 
and philosophers wrought and bequeathed it all to 
us as a heritage. Jt 7s owrs, ours to cherish. Beggars 
must not be choosers. If foreigners come to us, let 
them conform to us. We must not yield to them. 

Get my viewpoint clearly, please. I am not ad- 
vocating the union of Church and State. I am not 
advocating the idea that our schools shall be turned 
into temples of worship, nor made dispensaries of 
sectarian doctrines; that the teacher should be- 
come a kind of an apostle and gather his pupils into 


The Light of the World: 189 


prayer meetings. Not so at all. But it is all im- 
portant that the child, in the formative period of 
his life, should be taught that Almighty God is su- 
preme; that there is a voice, higher than the voice 
of the State, which says, “Thou shalt not kill, thou 
shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, 
thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neigh- 
bor;” that it is one of the highest virtues in man 
to be obedient to the laws of the State; that all 
mankind is a common brotherhood, and one may not 
with impunity trespass upon the rights of another; 
and that the same voice that imposes these conditions 
would have him temper all his acts with mercy, to 
be a savior and not a destroyer of men. 

Are men of the ordinary corporation type edu- 
cated? They have a far-reaching grasp of mind that 
is to be admired, but too often a littleness of soul 
that is to be despised. Many of them have no respect 
for law. They are industrial tyrants, forcing men 
under a lash keener and more cruel than that of the 
Egyptian taskmasters to build monuments to their 
vanity. 

If there is to be a sacrifice at all, let it be made 
to religion, for on that side lies the greater safety. 
Abstract law cannot save the world, else Rome 
would have saved it. Intellectuality cannot save 
the world, else Greece would have saved it. There 
must be something greater than either or both of 
these. That something is soul-culture, even religion 
itself, and without it there is and can be no 
salvation. 

And this religion must be a right religion. It 
will not do to say that Confucianism is all right 


190 Things Fundamental 


for the Chinese, Mohammedanism is good enough for 
the Turks, and a pure nature worship is sufficient 
for the savages. Isolation has been done away, and 
the whole world is living now in one great com- 
munity. When a part of the human family suffers, 
all members of the family suffer. That was fully 
demonstrated in the recent World War. Whatever 
degrades a part more or less drags down the whole. 
We must stand or fall together. As a measure of 
self-protection, therefore, the enlightened types of 
the race must furnish light to those who sit in dark- 
ness. The missionary operations of Christianity are 
justified by every token. 

Humanity has so far failed to establish a per- 
manent civilization. The highway of the world is 
literally strewn with the wrecks of empires. The 
crash of crumbling nations can even now be heard 
by him who has an ear to hear. It is futile to hope 
that there will ever be a permanent civilization until 
the kingdom of God has fully come. And that king- 
dom is coming. Lord Bacon has said: ‘‘The first 
creation of God in the work of the days was the light 
of sense; the last was the light of reason; and his 
sabbath work ever since has been the illumination 
of his spirit. First he breathed light upon the face 
of matter, chaos; then he breathed light into the 
face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth 
light into the face of his chosen.” The Uncreated 
Light of God has risen upon us, and will shine more 
and more unto the perfect day, pouring one radiant 
stream upon the path which the feet of the nations 
must follow to find that new earth in which righteous- 
ness dwells. 


CHAPTER XI 
THE ETERNAL QUESTION 


P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, in his “The Fact of 
Christ (page 39), says: 

Jesus Christ is, beyond all reasonable question, the greatest 
man who ever lived. The greatness of a man is to be esti- 
mated by two things: first, by the extent of his influence upon 
mankind; and, secondly—for no one is altogether great who 
is not also good—by the purity and dignity of his character. 
Tried by both these tests, Jesus is supreme among men. He 
is at once the most influential and the best of mankind. 


When a picture of a man on the earth is taken 
from an airplane, nothing is seen of him but his 
hat in the picture. The trouble is with the per- 
spective. The man himself is not distinguished 
from the ground plan. He is just a hat upon the 
surface of it. His relation to the objects cn the 
perspective plane is established as to position alone, 
and no more. And so it is with the ordinary view of 
Jesus. It is merely an airplane view. He is seen to 
be in the world, but it is not often seen how he is re- 
lated to the affairs of the world. In the view of 
most he is merely seen as a man among the mass of 
men; in the view of still fewer he looms as a great 
Teacher, or a great Reformer; of fewer still, as a 
personal Saviour. But is the “influence” of Jesus— 
in spite of what men think of him, or say about him; 
in spite of men’s attitude toward him—“supreme 
among men’’? Absolutely. Let us see. 

1. He holds the central place in the calendar. Hu- 
(191) 


£92 Things Fundamental. 


manity measures time from his Advent. He rules 
the chronology of the civilized world. Whatever 
questions may arise about chronology prior to his 
birth, there are no questions about chronology since 
his birth. Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Four 
Years ago Jesus Christ came into the world. One 
cannot write a letter, carry on commercia! pursuits, 
or prosecute suits at law without recognizing that 
fact. Commercial correspondence, letters of credit, 
notes, mortgages, deeds, and legal instruments of 
every kind must be dated. Money itself, the me- 
dium of exchange and standard of values, must be 
stamped with a recognition of Jesus; must bear a 
certain year A.D.—Anno Domini—-“in the year of 
the Lord.”’ And it is a well-known fact that the 
commercial strength of a nation increases in pro- 
portion to its recognition of Jesus. When Jesus 
came the world’s resources were not even known; 
and to this day the resources of the heathen na- 
tions lie practically untouched. The richest na- 
tions of the world are the Christian nations of the 
world. 

2. This was an ignorant and superstitious world 
into which Jesus came. Greece, indeed, has an 
intellectual development such as the world’ had 
never seen, and all that was best in her civilization 
still lives and blesses the world; but her culture was 
shot through with superstition, her philosophy was 
but a guess at the truth, and she only succeeded in 
building up an aristocracy on a mass of slavery. Je- 
sus came with “the law of truth” in his mouth 
(Mal. ii. 6). He was “full of grace and truth” 
(John i. 14). He was “the truth” (John xiv. 6). 


The Eternal Question 193 


He said: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free”’ (John viii. 32). Wherever 
the disciples of Jesus have gone throughout the 
world, they have established schools for the dis- 
semination of Christian truth. The public school 
systems of the civilized world are the gift of Christ 
to humanity through the Church. Just in proportion 
as Jesus has found entrance into the hearts of men, 
in that proportion have their minds been enlightened, 
superstition has fallen away, and freedom has come 
to mankind. The Christian nations of the world 
are the most enlightened nations of the world, and 
the freest. He has likewise given inspiration to all 
that is highest and best in the world’s literature. 
Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress’; Milton’s “ Paradise 
Lost”’; Dante’s “Inferno”; Wordsworth’s “Inti- 
mations of Immortality’’; Tennyson’s ‘In Memo- 
riam’’; in fact, the world’s masterpieces—to say 
nothing of the Bible itself, and particularly those 
matchless parables of Jesus—attest the place of 
Christ in the literature of the world and the con- 
tribution he has made to the progress of truth and 
freedom. 

3. It must likewise not be forgotten that this was a 
sick, diseased, helpless, suffering, and miserable world 
into which Christ came. Medical science as we know 
it was not even born. Lepers were nothing but out- 
casts from human society and associations. The 
afflicted resorted to charms, amulets, incantations, 
necromancy, and such like to find cures for their ills. 
Jesus became to the world the ‘‘Great Physician.” 
He put his hands upon the sick and healed them. 
And just before he went away into the heavens he 

13 


194 Things Fundamental 


promised: “He that believeth on me, the works 
that I do shall he do also; and greater works than 
these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.” 
That promise has been literally fulfilled. Jesus 
opened some blinded eyes while he was here; but 
under the medical skill of our day multiplied thou- 
sands more blinded eyes are opened every day than 
Jesus opened when he was on earth. 

The world knew little about hygiene and nothing 
of hospitals then, but “‘during the early centuries - 
of Christianity the hospice was a shelter for the sick, 
the poor, the orphans, the old, the travelers, and the 
needy of every kind” (“Catholic Encyclopedia,” 
page 475). The “noscomia,” or hospitals, were 
almost if not entirely in the hands of the Church, 
were supported by the funds of the Chruch, and 
under the administration of the Church. True, it is 
held that the “‘germ’’ of the hospital system had its 
origin in pre-Christian times; that the temples of 
Saturn, which existed in Egypt some four thousand 
years before Christ, were, in their earliest forms, 
medical schools, where asylums were afforded for 
the insane; and that there were clinics at Heliopolis, 
Dendra, Thebes, and Memphis; but all this is wrapt 
in mist and mystery, and even if true carries with it 
a sort of wizardry. For instance, the rite of ‘‘incu- 
bation,” as it is called, involved the taking of the 
sick to the temple, in whose shade they slept and 
dreamed until the god informed them of a “‘cure.”’ 
That is little, if any, different from the systems 
practiced by the heathen of our day and all days. 
Truth compels the statement that the hospital 
system, such as we have it, is a Christian institution, 


The Hternal Question 195 


the gift of Christ to humanity through the Church. 
The movement has gone on and grown until now 
hospitals are found everywhere throughout the 
civilized world, with ‘‘every department of medicine 
and surgery, and every appliance and means for the 
alleviation of suffering, the healing of wounds, the 
reduction of fractures, the removal of malformations 
and foreign growths, the surgical restoration of 
damaged and diseased organs and bones, and 
everything of every kind which experience and 
knowledge prove to be necessary to the rapid cure of 
disease”’ (“‘Encyclopeedia Britannica,’ page 794). 
The orphanage, homes for the aged—in fact, every 
eleemosynary institution of the world had its in- 
ception and growth under Christianity. 

4, In the art galleries of the world Jesus is the same 
dominant fact. Rossetti’s “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” 
in the Tate Gallery of London; Murillo’s ‘‘Im- 
maculate Conception,” in the Louvre at Paris; 
Correggio’s “‘Holy Night” and Hoffmann’s “‘ Christ 
and the Doctors,” in the Zwinger Gallery at Dresden; 
Bloch’s ‘‘Come unto Me,” a fresco in the Castle 
Frederiksberg; Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration,’ in the 
Vatican; Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,’ in 
the Sistine Chapel—to say nothing of the paintings of 
Hunt, Burne-Jones, Merson, Long, Millais, Rodin, 
Giotto, Tissot, and others—forever set Christ apart 
as the theme and inspiration of art. 

5. This was an unmerciful world into which Christ 
came and at the hands of which he died. The terrible 
and revolting instruments of heathen torture found 
their climax in the “‘scourge” and “cross,” burning 
pitch and boiling oil. Under the heathen system 


196 Things Fundamental 


infants were “exposed,” the aged and infirm aban- 
doned, while enemies taken in battles were sub- 
jected to every barbarity that heathen savagery 
could devise. Christ came to put an end to this 
human misery. He taught: ‘Blessed are the merci- 
ful: for they shall obtain mercy.” He took a little 
child, set him by him, and said, “He that is least 
among you all, the same shall be great,”’ thus putting 
a valuation upon child life which the world did not 
appreciate then and has been slow to appreciate 
since. The ‘Prince of Peace,” he pronounced 
against war, saying: ‘“‘He that taketh the sword 
shall die by the sword.’”’ Though wars have since 
been waged in his name, never with his sanction. 
Yet in spite of that he has gone onto the battle fields 
of the world with his ministry of merey. The Chap- 
laincy, the Y. M. C. A., the Salvation Army, and 
the Red Cross are all Christian institutions and have 
had their part in alleviating the miseries of war. 
“The Greatest Mother in the World,” applied to 
the Red Cross and flamed in posters all over the 
world, gripped the hearts of many during the recent 
world tragedy, and attests the part that institution 
played in the conflict. In consequence there were 
multitudes of women who almost worked their firiger 
nails off every day of the week for the Red Cross, 
but would not so much as give the ravelings of those 
nails for the Church Jesus gave his blood to estab- 
lish, nor grace with their presence a single one of its 
services on Sunday. Who has not heard soldiers 
praising in highest terms the Y. M. C. A., the 
Salvation Army, and the Red Cross that followed 
them to the battle field and in the same breath 


The Hternal Question 197 


abusing the Church that put all those agencies on the 
battle field? If one doubt that the Church put them 
there, let him search heathen history and find if he 
can a single such agency on any battle field in all 
the wars heathenism ever waged. These agencies 
are the children of the Church, and it is poor business 
and the basest ingratitude to praise the children 
and damn the Mother. The Church is the Greatest 
Mother in the World. Out of her fruitful womb has 
come everything worth while in human civilization. 
‘Destroy her, and all these agencies of mercy will die 
and civilization itself perish from the earth. 

6. Every Brotherhood of the world owes tts ex- 
astence to Christ. Freemasonry, though not a religion, 
nevertheless draws its inspiration from Christ, and 
will be perpetuated only in so far as the principles of 
Christian truth pervade and control it. The dis- 
tinguishing features of the Master Mason’s degree 
are the resurrection of the body and the immortality 
of the soul. The contention of the Masonic his- 
torian Mackey that “‘the principles of Freemasonry 
preceded the advent of Christianity” is not sound. 
If the “symbols” and “legends” of Freemasonry 
“are derived from the Solomonic Temple and from 
the people even anterior to that,’ as he says, it must 
be constantly kept in remembrance that the whole 
Jewish system centered about the person and fact 
of Christ, and contained in embryo every principle of 
Christian truth and teaching. It can be easily 
shown that every utterance of Christ’s Sermon on the 
Mount was foreshadowed in Old Testament teach- 
ing. As Christ is the only person so far in human 
history whose body has been raised from the dead, 


198 Things Fundamental 


he is essentially “‘the Man of Mount Moriah.’ 
Masonry bars from its membership no class of men 
as a class but the atheists. Christianity bars them 
also. The atheist is the Ishmael of the human race. 
He must renounce his atheism before he can become 
either a Christian or a Mason. The Christian 
Church that bars the Masons as a class is more 
sectarian than Masonry. But while it may be quite 
politic to say that Masonry’s is a_ universal 
altar, of whose illumination Jew and Moslem, 
Brahman and Buddhist alike may conscientiously 
partake, it remains, in fact if not in theory, that the 
Master Mason’s degree is ‘‘a Christian institution.” 

7. When Christ came his eyes looked out upon an 
utterly selfish and loveless world. In all the Greek 
language, though polished and esthetic to an un- 
wonted degree, there was no word adequately oppo- 
site to misos, meaning hate in all its energy. They 
had philanthropia indeed, but that was not a ruling 
principle of life; rather only that exhibition of justice 
which gave a man, whether friend or foe, what he 
was entitled to. The race knew how to hate, but 
they knew not how to love. They had no love for 
God, nor for one another. To save them out of it 
all it was necessary for God to send his Son into the 
world. Accordingly it is said that ‘‘God so loved 
the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” A 
love like that and self-surrender are inseparable. 
That love, then, which was first exhibited by Christ 
in the work of redemption is love in its highest 
conceivable form. And as the gospel proclaims one 
divine deed alone, so it demands one human deed 
alone—love. It is not an attribute of man; it be- 


The Eternal Question 199 


longs to God. It is deposited in the human heart by 
the Spirit of God, and is required to be manifested 
by the recipients of it to all men, even enemies, as 
well as to God. It is holy and divine love, the love 
that exists between Christ and God, the love of God 
to man, the love of man to God, the love of the 
saints, the love which chooses its objects with de- 
cision of will, even enemies, and gives itself in self- 
denying surrender and compassionate devotion to 
them. This is the love that came down out of heaven 
on the day of Pentecost and will leave the earth with 
the saints risen to meet their returning Lord. It is 
the greatest in the Pauline trinity of graces, the 
one which will survive the Parousia and live on 
when faith has been lost in sight and hope ends in 
fruition. 

8. The womanhood of the world was in bondage 
when Christ came. Woman had no position, wielded 
no influence. She was a slave, a human chattel 
bought and sold in the market place at man’s im- 
perial will. No more degraded was the lot of Amer- 
ica’s squaw than that of the woman who lived in 
that ancient age of the world. Christ struck the 
shackles from her. No wonder she was the last at the 
cross and the first at the tomb! Slowly but surely 
unfettered virtue has come to her throne. Woman 
is more patient, more tolerant, more merciful, more 
tender than man. Remembering that Christ said to 
her, ‘‘Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no 
more,”’ this has been her attitude toward the world. 
Believing that the victories of peace are more re- 
nowned than the victories of war, she is inculcating 
this idea and will bring up a new race, a race that will 


200 Things Fundamental 


repudiate the doctrine of hate and war and inaugu- 
rate the gospel of love and peace. Out from man’s 
side she came, everywhere his equal and comple- 
ment; by his side she belongs, and is, and by the 
grace of Christ will remain through all the ages. 

9. The finest product of the Christian Church is the 
Christian home. The world knew nothing about a 
home like that until Christ came, and the poor 
heathen world knows nothing of that kind of a home 
even to-day. The family is the unit of human 
society. As the family goes, the nation goes. To 
use the language of Martin Luther, ‘‘Out of the 
family is the nation spun.”” Men who do not give 
God first place in their thought and lives have a 
weakened sense of responsibility to their offspring. 
They either neglect their moral training altogether 
or delegate that training to others. The family 
altar, upon which the fires are kept burning and 
daily sacrifices offered unto God, is the mightiest 
influence in the earth next to the Church itself. 
There respect for authority, appreciation of the 
rights of others, obedience, patriotism, loyalty, self- 
sacrifice, and love to God—cardinal virtues all— 
are inculcated, and children so trained go out into 
the national family to practice those virtues until 
they ripen for place in the family above. 

10. Christ ts regnant in song. The tendency to 
express the inner nature through a more expressive 
medium than language is universal, characteristic 
of savage nations even at the present day. The 
history of song shows two main divisions, the folk- 
song, which might be called the spontaneous out- 
burst of untutored minds, and the art-song, the 


The Eternal Question 201 


finished product of trained musicians. The earliest 
development of melody came through the folk-song, 
which has perhaps made its highest reach in the 
plantation melodies of the darkies in our own South- 
land. It was not until the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century that the art-song came into vogue. 
It makes its highest reach in the anthem, varying 
from the exultant “Gloria in Excelsis” of William 
J. Kraft to the majestic ‘He shall reign forever and 
ever” in the “Hallelujah Chorus” of Handel’s 
“Messiah.” But in the Christian hymn has been 
found the best medium for the expression of the 
inner nature of man. The world was sad when 
Christ came. Through the centuries men had 
followed their dead to the tomb and with unspeak- 
able grief laid them away without expectation of 
meeting them again. Black, emblem of darkness, 
was made the symbol of mourning, and in these 
lugubria the bereaved clothed themselves and would 
not be comforted. But the herald angel, in the 
Song of Annunciation, broke the midnight stillness 
at Bethlehem with a pean of praise. In commemo- 
ration of his coming the enraptured poet sang, “Joy 
to the world, the Lord is come.’’ Drooping spirits 
broke forth in joyful lays, and grief found in him 
a joy unspeakable. He is the “Joy of the desolate,” 
the “Joy of all the meek.”’ All creation lifted up her 
voice “in full anthems of joy’”’ when 


“He burst from the fetters of darkness that bound him, 
Resplendent in glory to live and to save.” 


By reason of his resurrection, ascension, and reign, 
we are told that heaven rejoices. Into the home of 


202 Things Fundamental 


grief Jesus alone can go and take comfort and heal- 
ing. He is just as truly Master of the tempest there 
as he was of the storm that night on the Galilean 
sea. He invites, ‘‘Come, ye disconsolate”’; and they 
come. From the ends of the earth they cry unto him, 
“Lead, Kindly Light,” ‘‘ Nearer, My God, to Thee,” 
“Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Rock of Ages, Cleft 
for Me.” Though the storms of life beat mercilessly 
upon him, the child of faith is made equal to the 
emergency through the prayer, 
“‘While life’s dark maze I tread, 
And griefs around me spread, 
Be thou my guide: 

Bid darkness turn to day, 

Wipe sorrow’s tears away, 

Nor let me ever stray 

From thee aside.” 

What would the world do in the hour of grief with- 
out Jesus? And when the program of redemption 
is ended, death and the grave have been rendered 
ineffectual, and sorrow and sighing have fled away, 
there will be ‘‘a new song”—begun by the Church 
of the Redeemed, carried on by the angels of heaven, 
and resounded by all creation: 


Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! 


11. And, finally, prayer to God must be made in the 
name of Jesus. Jesus said, “‘I am the way.” And 
that is literally true. ‘“‘There is none other name 
given under heaven and among men whereby we 
must be saved.’”’ There is no way of approach to 
God except through the name of Jesus. The heathen 
may go through his weird incantations, calling upon 
the name of his gods, but all to no avail. One might 


The Eternal Question 203 


pray until the day he dies, and get no answer, be- 
cause not asking in the name of Jesus. Jesus says, 
“Tf ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.’’ 

Truly, after the manner of the Psalmist, we may 
inquire, Whither shall we flee from Christ’s presence? 
If we ascend into heaven, he ts there. If we take the 
wings of the morning and fly away to the uttermost 
parts of the earth, he 1s there. In every place and 
sphere of life, at every turn, and to the remotest 
points to which the imagination of man can run, 
in life and in death, here and hereafter, the fact of 
Jesus meets us. We cannot get rid of him if we 
would. His place is fixed in human life and destiny. 
We cannot change it. In all these respects even the 
rankest infidel or atheist must acknowledge him. 
And it is not to be doubted for a single moment that 
if all these benefits Christ has brought to the world 
could be marshaled in order and caused to pass 
out of existence one by one, as the last faded from 
view and left the world in utter heathen darkness, 
the most godless man on earth would cry in agony of 
soul, “Come back.” 

But to accept Jesus as a fact, the one supreme and 
essential fact of history, is not sufficient. ‘‘ What 
shall I do, then, with Jesus?”’ Pilate, in perplexity of 
mind, inquired of the Jews, thus evidencing that the 
question had at last become a personal one with him. 
As it was then, so it has ever been, still is, and must 
ever be—a personal question which every man must 
answer for himself. Supernaturally begotten, Jesus 
was born of woman “the Son of God” and “‘the 
Son of Man.” Dedicated in his baptism to the 
task of the world’s redemption, he endured in his 


204 Things Fundamental 


conflict with opposing powers all the sufferings 
diabolism could inflict, until it culminated in the 
tragedy of the cross and a broken heart. Demon- 
strating his power over the dominion of death, he 
emerged from the grave the risen, living, and reign- 
ing Lord, with all power in heaven and earth lodged 
in his hands. He is “the Light of the World” and 
the only hope of a permanent civilization for man. 
He is not only the was of history, he is the zs of the 
present and the will be of the future... In view of 
this no man can be morally neutral toward him. 
He becomes at last a purely personal question 
which every man must decide. The Scripture view 
is: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any 
man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come 
in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” 
(Rev. iii. 20). He must be accepted or rejected as a 
fact of expertence. For it is possible for one to know 
the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his 
sufferings; to have Christ in him the hope of glory. 
That question each man must decide for himself. 
The general benefits of Christ’s coming no man can 
help enjoying. But this special benefit no man can 
enjoy unless he willsit. The “prodigal” said, “I will 
arise and go.’”’ The very essence of salvation is 
the will to be saved. 

“What shall I do, then, with Jesus?” That was 
Pilate’s question, but it has now come to be every 
man’s question. Well, what did Pilate do with him? 
First, he declared him to be without fault. So allmen 
have declared him. They could not do otherwise. 
That is the attestation of history. . But mere com- 
pliments of Jesus are not enough. Judas kissed him 


The Eternal Question 205 


to betray him and Pilate praised him to kill him. 
Next, Pilate substituted Barabbas for Jesus. Now 
Barabbas was guilty of treason, murder, and felony; 
yet Pilate substituted this notorious criminal for 
Jesus, whom he had declared to be innocent. He 
washed his hands in denial of responsibility for 
Jesus’s blood, but one cannot get rid of respon- 
sibility after that fashion. Personal responsibility 
cannot be shifted, though the rabble ery, “His 
blood be upon us.’”’ Sometimes a man foolishly 
fancies that he can shift his personal responsibility 
upon his corporate responsibility, and do things in 
the name of a corporation that he could not do in 
his own name, but that is entirely false. Man can 
have no responsibility but a personal responsibility. 

Whom have you substituted for Jesus? You 
must excuse me if I am entirely personal here. 
With the most painful toil I have gone through 
the drudgery of these pages, my heart almost break- 
ing at times over the havoc these critics have wrought 
in the world and the souls their philosophy has 
damned, in order that I might set out the evidence 
in the ease. Now, like the lawyer pleading his case 
before the jury, I must press for a decision. All 
my labors will have been in vain if I fail to win the 
jury. Whom have yow substituted for Jesus? You 
must give allegiance to some one. You cannot 
evade it. The question is up to you for answer. 

Have you once rejoiced in the fact, 
“Jesus, [ my cross have taken, 

All to leave, and follow thee,” 

and now have allowed that cross to slip from your 
shoulders and given your allegiance to the prince 


206 Things Fundamental 


of this world as a substitute for your allegiance to 
Jesus? 

Lastly, Pilate scourged and crucified Jesus. What 
have you done with him? Have you driven him 
from the door of your heart? Have you denied him 
his rightful place in your life? In every heart there 
is a cross and a crown. If self is crowned, Jesus is 
on the cross; if Jesus is crowned, self is on the cross. 
Have you nailed Jesus to the cross? Think of the 
infinite love and pity of his heart. Just before 
his crucifixion he went out to the Mount of Olives 
and looked out over Jerusalem. As he looked he 
wept. As he wept he cried, ‘‘O Jerusalem, Jerusa- 
lem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest. 
them which are sent unto thee, how often would I 
have gathered thy children together, even as a hen 
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye 
would not!’ What a remarkable apostrophe that! 
God weeping over hard-hearted and rebellious men! 
God crushed, as it were, under the terrible weight of 
human indifference and sin! The very heart of God 
melting and pouring itself out in agony for sinners! 
Do you think his attitude toward men has changed? 
No, he loves them still. 

Pilate hung a declaration above his head in 
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, “THIS IS THE KING 
OF THE JEws.” But that did not soften his 
crime. Mere intellectual acknowledgments of Jesus 
are not sufficient. Wuth the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness. Will you admit him? It is your 
question. No one else can decide it for you. No 
greater moral offense is possible than to reject him. 
LET JESUS COME INTO YOUR HEART! 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


I AM more or less indebted to the following texts, 
which I have studied and used in the preparation 
of this work. In the body of the text I have en- 
deavored to give proper credit to the author when 
directly quoting his language. If I have failed in 
any instance, it has been due to oversight and not 
from any disposition to commit literary theft. 


“The Hexaglot Bible.” Funk & Wagnalls (1906). 

‘The Bible Commentary.”’ Scribners (1915). 

Matthew Henry: ‘‘Commentary.”’ 

Thayer: “‘Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.” 
Harper & Bros. (1899). 

Cremer: ‘‘ Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament 
Greek.” T. &. T. Clark (1895). 

Robertson: ‘‘A Grammar of the Greek New Testament 
in the Light of Historical Research.’”? Hodder & Stoughton 
(1914). 

Schaff: ‘‘History of the Christian Church.’ Scribners 
(1904). 

Sheldon: “‘System of Christian Doctrine.”’ Jennings & 
Graham (1903). 

Weber: ‘‘ History of Philosophy.’’ Scribners (1897). 

Garvie: “‘Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus.”” Hodder & 
Stoughton (1908). 

Fairbairn: ‘“‘The Philosophy of the Christian Religion.” 
Hodder & Stoughton (1902). 

Fisher: ‘‘The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief.’ 
Scribners (1902). 

Orr: “‘The Virgin Birth of Christ.’’ Scribners (1912). 

Rauschenbusch: ‘‘Christianity and the Social Crisis.’ 
Hodder & Stoughton (1907). 

Drummond: “Natural Law in the Spiritual World.” 
Lovell, Coryell & Co. 

Draper: ‘‘Confiict between Religion and Science.” D, 
Appleton & Co. (1912). 

(207) 


208 Bibliography 


Gwatkin: ‘“‘The Knowledge of God.” T. & T. Clark 
(1906). 

Taylor: “‘The Miracles of Our Saviour.” Hodder & 
Stoughton (1890). 

Smith: ‘‘ Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old 
Testament.’”’ Hodder & Stoughton (Sixth Edition). 

Kent: ‘‘The Origin and Permanent Value of the Old 
Testament.’’ Scribners (1906). 

Spencer: ‘‘ First Principles.”” H. M. Caldwell Co. 

Jordan: ‘‘Biblical Criticism and Modern Thought.” T. 
& T. Clark (1909). 

Simpson: ‘The Fact of Christ.” Revell (Second Edition). 

Dale: “The Atonement.” (Twenty-fifth Edition). 

King: “Fundamental Questions.””’ Macmillan (1917).7 

Bacon: ‘‘Novum Organum.”’ 

Godet: ‘Epistle to the Romans.” Funk & Wagnalls. 

Bond: ‘Positive Evidences of Christianity.”” Barbee & 
Smith (1899). 

Trumbull: ‘The Blood Covenant.’”’ John D. Wattles & 
Co. (1898). 

Darwin: ‘‘The Origin of Species.”” Thomas Y. Crowell & 
Co. 

*“Wesley’s Notes.”’ 

*““Watson’s Institutes.” 

Green: ‘‘The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch.” Scrib- 
ners (1916). 

Zenos: ‘‘The Elements of the Higher Criticism.” Funk & 
Wagnalls (1895). 

Moller: ‘‘Are the Critics Right?’” Revell (1919). 

Fitchett: ‘‘The Beliefs of Unbelief.’”” Eaton & Mains 
(1907). 

McTyeire: “A History of Methodism.” Smith & Lamar 
(1904). 

Ridpath: “‘History of the World.’’ 

Discipline of the M. E. Church, South. 

Mackey: “‘ Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.”’ 

Hall: ‘‘The Problem of Human Life Here and Hereafter.” 
Hall & Co. (1880). 

Josephus: ‘‘A History of the Jews.” 


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